Even if you don’t know the name Sidney Lumet, even if you haven’t seen his movies, you can’t avoid his influence. In such potent ’70s films as “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Serpico” and “Network,” he established a vision of New York — corrupt, freewheeling, cynical, criminal, nuts — that became the nation’s dominant view of the city and stayed that way for two decades.
And as one of Hollywood’s most respected liberals, he had a powerful hold on the industry’s imagination, even as the internal contradictions of his classic progressivism escaped many of his fans.
Like many a great New Yorker, Lumet, who died Saturday at 86, came from elsewhere (Philadelphia). Learning his trade on the stage and establishing a skill with actors that would result in many of them getting Oscar nominations, he burst into film with 1957’s “12 Angry Men,” which would establish a template for his gritty, strongly performed, pavement-eye view of the city’s pains and poisons.
Clever as a work of suspense, the film became an ur-myth of liberal fantasy. As a lone holdout (Henry Fonda) in a jury room questions the evidence against an apparently guilty Hispanic youth, it slowly occurs to the audience and the characters that the accused actually is innocent, with a racist rant by one juror marking a turning point.
One wonders how many young lawyers got into criminal defense with this film holding a central place in their moral foundations — Bronx-born Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotoymayor cited it as a key influence — and how many were later disabused of the notion that New York City jails are packed with innocents.
Unlike Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, Lumet wasn’t much interested in visual poetry or epic scope. They were in love with movies. He was in love with justice and its martyrs.
“Serpico” (1973), based on the true story of an honest city cop who became an enemy of the entire police force because he blew the whistle on colleagues who were taking bribes from criminals, created an impression of all-pervasive wickedness and incurable rot in the city’s leading institutions. If the police can’t be trusted, who can?
Nobody, decided the businesses and professionals who fled the city in the ’70s.
But consider the ultimate message of Lumet’s most enduring work — 1975’s “Dog Day Afternoon.” Few films treated real-life armed bank robbers with such love, and in the end, when one thieving hostage-taker is killed by law enforcement and the other is taken to jail, the arrow of injustice again points at — the police.
Given the film’s sympathy for Sonny (Al Pacino), who only robbed the bank to pay for his lover’s sex-change operation, and Sal (John Cazale), a sidekick so dim that when asked what country he would prefer to flee to he replies, “Wyoming,” a happy ending could only have been the escape of these two felons.
“Dog Day” actually shows the hostages taking the side of their captors in the cinema’s most memorable — yet completely unconscious — portrayal of Stockholm syndrome, a term born of yet another August bank robbery that began in Sweden a year and a day after the 1972 robbery depicted in “Dog Day.”
Unlamented by Lumet, the city’s justice system had gone fully Stockholm, with overwhelmed judges recycling criminals back to the streets and demoralized cops wondering why they should bother arresting anyone as lawlessness ruled. Here was injustice dealt to law-abiding innocents, on a massive scale. The New York Times christened it “the age of the mugger.”
The moment when Sonny taunts police by yelling, “Attica! Attica!” is not just funny and searing, it’s important. “Attica! Attica!” means this: Cops should let riots rage because criminals should be free — free to blow off steam, rob banks to pay for sex changes, express their individualism, show the Man he can’t keep the people down. Lumet was a leader of this school of thinking.
As late as 1991, when cops allowed a murderous riot to rage for three days in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a couple of miles east of where “Dog Day” was filmed, “Attica! Attica!” was all but official public policy.