Dog Day Afternoon is the third rail of male love and loneliness—a primal scream from the sweltering streets of a stone broke New York City. My dad, Sidney Lumet, directed the 1975 film and his heart cracked for its antiheroes, Sonny and Sal (played by Al Pacino and John Cazale): “They’re like open wounds up there,” he once said.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach can’t remember a time before he loved the movie, about a pair of bumbling crooks who try to rob a Brooklyn bank on a sweltering summer day. “There was something so adolescent about both these guys,” he tells me. “They seemed so unformed in different ways. When you’re a teenager, the world is big and mysterious. You can’t pull it into focus.”
Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal will try to channel that energy on Broadway this spring, in a stage adaptation written by Pulitzer winner Stephen Adly Guirgis and directed by Rupert Goold. Bernthal plays doomed Sonny, who’s hoping to pay for his lover’s gender-affirming operation; his longtime pal and costar on The Bear plays volatile Sal, the loneliest guy in the world.
The film is based on an actual attempted 1972 heist, which involved a conspirator no one saw coming: the mob of overheated Brooklynites who surrounded the cops surrounding the bank. Live television crews captured the chaos, each faction functioning as another barbarian at the gate.
Sonny and Sal feel like meaner cousins of Willy Loman: left-behind men who have failed their partners, failed their children, failed themselves. The heist is their last chance to protect and provide. “Sonny’s desire to take care of people is so intrinsic, it’s worth fighting and dying for,” says Bernthal. “He is unheard. That’s why he’s screaming so loud.”
