Some notes on a powerful movie which uses its desultory pacing for impact. Lots of meandering punctuated by intensity.<\/p>\n
# Hey this takes place on my birthday! Or, you know, six years exactly before my birthday.<\/p>\n
# I love the side characters, especially the women. The men are just kind of there but the women are great, especially Penelope Allen as the head teller who emerges as the leader of the hostages.<\/p>\n
# \u201cI\u2019m a Catholic, I don\u2019t want to hurt anybody.\u201d Oh my gosh, why are Catholics such nonsense people? Genuinely think Sonny, our bank robber\/bad lover\/dog trying to finally have his day, is one of the great Catholic characters on film. I\u2019d watch a pretty savage comedy about the doomed Catholic transgender wedding with the soon-to-be defrocked priest, something with the tone of Withnail & I<\/em>. There\u2019s a helplessness to that kind of Catholicism; it\u2019s a deep identity you can\u2019t wrench out of your bones, it\u2019s like the \u2018Salem\u2019s Lot<\/em> description of what it\u2019s like to live in a small town<\/a>.<\/p>\n # They tell you on the DVD sleeve that Sonny is robbing this bank to get money for his lover\u2019s sex-change operation. So it isn\u2019t a twist for contemporary audiences. No idea how it played at the time. But for me what stood out about this whole element of the movie is Al Pacino\u2019s terrific weary resignation. As soon as all the gay marchers start arriving, people start wolf whistling when he pats down the FBI guys, his partner in crime starts yowling about how it isn\u2019t two<\/em> homosexuals! just one<\/em> homosexual\u2013that<\/em> guy!\u2026 as soon as all that starts up, and whenever it happens, Sonny just looks so sick and tired of it all. The same reaction whether people are mocking him or going all Gay Is Good. It\u2019s not unexpected for him, he\u2019s not angry about it the way he\u2019s angry about lots of things, it\u2019s just really wearying. That\u2019s such an honest & empathetic choice, for Sidney Lumet or Pacino or whoever.<\/p>\n ETA: Apparently the guy whose real heist attempt inspired the movie said<\/a> that the depiction of his relationship with his lover was basically accurate, but the depictions of his wife and his mother were not. And in fact the Leon\/Sonny relationship feels raw, weird and real, whereas the mom and wife both feel like fairly misogynist cliches.<\/p>\n # Everyone\u2019s constantly trying to get on Sonny\u2019s side, for their own reasons, and although he can be briefly buoyed up by popular support (\u201cAttica! Attica!\u201d) he quickly subsides into anxious isolation. Full of entirely justified mistrust. I like this, all the reaching hands and how he constantly dodges them, and you can imagine that that\u2019s how this guy ended up in a bank with a gun.<\/p>\n # Speaking of, the atmosphere of total swirling mistrust feels much more earned here than in some \u201970s films. (Blue Collar<\/em><\/a> is another one which does this well.)<\/p>\n # Al Pacino is 5\u20197\u2033??? Is that short? I just looked up Robert Downey, Jr and he\u2019s listed as 5\u2032 8 1\/2\u2033 (which is how a toddler counts birthdays, my friends\u2026) so I guess that is short. I guess I am conditioned by figure skating: Paul Wylie is 5\u20193 1\/2\u2033, and very very tall Christopher Bowman, speaking of Catholics<\/a>, was 5\u201910\u201d. Anyway I am grateful for Pacino\u2019s diminutive stature, which this movie exploits perfectly.<\/p>\n # In a couple different places, including the final \u201cwhere are they now\u201d titles, the movie says Sonny has children \u201con welfare.\u201d I really wonder how that played at the time: \u201con welfare\u201d instead of any other phrase denoting poverty or need. Did it come across as a sign of his failure as a provider? Did it provoke audience sympathy, another reason he feels so kicked-around? This collection<\/a> of black children\u2019s rhymes and tales from the late \u201960s and \u201970s suggests that welfare<\/a> was already sometimes a synecdoche for the shamefulness of poverty, because in anti-Christian modernity need will always be shameful, but more often just a sign of bad luck. So I don\u2019t know whether \u201cand his children are on welfare\u201d would have sounded as harsh to this movie\u2019s intended audience as it does to me.<\/p>\n # I have no comment on the whole \u201cthis is a true story\u201d shtik except that that strikes me as a weird and probably unkind thing to do.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some notes on a powerful movie which uses its desultory pacing for impact. Lots of meandering punctuated by intensity. # Hey this takes place on my birthday! Or, you know, six years exactly before my birthday. # I love the side characters, especially the women. The men are just kind of there but the women […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,7],"tags":[32,30,77],"class_list":["post-10899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-gayer-than-a-picnic-basket","tag-mackerel-snapping-2","tag-prepare-for-life-in-capitalist-america-play-class-struggle-the-game"],"yoast_head":"\n