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The opening montage is updated from Vidor's Street Scene, hard-hats and mutts and garbage made oddly pastoral by an Elton John ballad. Closing time at the First Brooklyn Savings Bank, the nervous mook (Al Pacino) stumbles in with rifle in flower box and scrambles to corral the tellers. "Cheer up, girls! You're going to be the veterans of a robbery." "Really bad vibes" send one accomplice packing, the other (John Cazale) clings to a clammy death wish, imploding while the hapless leader explodes. Inside is a nearly empty vault and no air conditioner, outside is a roiling mass of cops, reporters, onlookers. "What a fuckin' comedy!" The would-be mastermind is a disenfranchised vet, a henpecked husband, a squashed scion, an impromptu celebrity, a string of feverish Pacino workshops. He's also a most frazzled bigamist, the misbegotten caper was meant to finance the sex-change surgery of the other wife (Chris Sarandon). "I'm with a guy who don't know where Wyoming is. You think you got problems?" The joke is that this is Big Deal on Madonna Street by way of Fassbinder, Sidney Lumet embraces it matter-of-factly as another day in New York. Two visages of the law, the commiserating agitation of the police sergeant (Charles Durning) negotiating the demands, the ruthless cool of the FBI agent (James Broderick) planning an execution. Among the hostages, the bank manager (Sully Boyar) slips into diabetic shock and the no-nonsense clerk (Penelope Allen) chides their captor: "You could watch your language, you know." A sweaty siege, a fickle spotlight, "just a freak show" to the crowd but an interlude of audacious delicacy to a pair of outcast lovers fumbling through a farewell over the phone. Lumet maintains a splendidly controlled chaos all the way to the blunt denouement, with the protagonist at the airport tarmac "like a ripe stool in the world's straining anus" (Osborne). Cinematography by Victor J. Kemper. With Lance Henriksen, Carol Kane, Susan Peretz, Judith Malina, Beulah Garrick, Amy Levitt, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Gary Springer, Dick Anthony Williams, and Dominic Chianese.
--- Fernando F. Croce |