Doggy Afternoon

Oscars 1976 - won: Best Original Screenplay (Frank Pierson) Academy Awards 1976 - Nominations: Best Picture (Martin Bregman, Martin Elfand), Best Leading Actor (Al Pacino), Best Supporting Actor (Chris Sarandon), Best Director (Sidney Lumet), Best Editing (Dede Allen) Golden Globes 1976 - Nominations: Best Drama, Best Actor in a Drama (Al Pacino), Best Supporting Actor (John Cazale), Best Supporting Actor (Charles Durning), Best Director (Sidney Lumet), Best Screenplay (Frank Pierson), Most promising new actor (Chris Sarandon) BAFTA 1976 - wins: Best Leading Actor (Al Pacino), Best Editing (Dede Allen) BAFTA 1976 - Nominations: Best Director (Sidney Lumet), Best Soundtrack, Best Film, Best Screenplay (Frank Pierson)

Like Woody Allen's Manhattan, Sidney Lumet's Doggy Afternoon opens with a sequence of paintings of New York.

Instead of Blue Rhapsody, Gershwin plays Elton John's Amoreen. Instead of a fireworks show over skyscrapers, we watch a Doberman rummaging in an overturned garbage can and a homeless man sleeping on the street. Somewhere in the background, the inscription on the cinema awning flashes: A Star Is Born, the birth of a star. That star is Sonny Wortzik (the brave Al Pacino), a guy who gets out of a car under a bank in Brooklyn with his buddies.

The real story of the robbery, which took place in front of the television cameras, allows the creators to tell about the crisis of society. The metropolis is not a romantic playground for intellectuals like Allen's, but an arena of American decline. Lumet talks about capitalism, war, inequality, rage. And about a new medium, which no one called a reality show at the time.

(Maciej Jarkowiec for Timeless Film Festival Warsaw)