2006 was a good year for Denzel Washington on the big screen, because he starred in two high-grossing, high-quality thrillers: “Deja Vu” and “Inside Man.” Just as “Deja Vu” was “Vertigo” as a time-traveling action movie, “Inside Man” was director Spike Lee’s 21st century update on Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon.”
Written by Richard Gerwitz, “Inside Man” follows a hostage situation during a robbery at a Manhattan bank. Washington plays NYPD hostage negotiator Detective Keith Frazier, squaring off against the robbers’ leader, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen). The story didn’t begin with Lee (Ron Howard was in talks to direct “Inside Man” first), but he made it his own. “Inside Man” is definitely more of a crowd pleaser than something like “Do The Right Thing,” as seen by it also being Lee’s highest-grossing film to date, but it’s absolutely a Spike Lee joint.
Lee’s range as a director comes in part from the breadth of his knowledge about movies. When he’s not directing, he’s teaching film classes at his graduate alma mater, New York University. Lumet is one of Lee’s filmmaking idols, and he relished the chance to make a movie in the same vein as Lumet’s classic “Dog Day Afternoon.”
Released in 1975, “Dog Day Afternoon” was based on a real 1972 bank robbery/hostage situation in Brooklyn. John Wojtowicz (renamed Sonny Wortzik and played by Al Pacino in the movie) and Salvatore Naturile (played by John Cazale) attempted to rob a Chase Manhattan bank because Wojtowicz wanted the money to pay for his wife Elizabeth Eden’s gender-affirming surgery. Reporting suggests there may have been additional motives, including involvement from the mob, but the movie focuses on Sonny’s efforts to help his darling “Leon Shermer” (Chris Sarandon) become herself.
The promotional materials for “Dog Day Afternoon” emphasize the fact it’s a true story. The film’s tagline, which came in several abbreviated forms across different posters, reads:
“The robbery should have taken 10 minutes. 4 hours later, the bank was like a circus sideshow. 8 hours later, it was the hottest thing on live TV. 12 hours later, it was all history. And it’s all true.”
“Inside Man” is not a true story, but as a piece of filmmaking, how does it compare to “Dog Day Afternoon”?
Inside Man was a modern riff on Dog Day Afternoon
Spike Lee is a New Yorker, and many of his films (“Inside Man” included) are set in his hometown. When adapting David Benioff’s “25th Hour,” he added a new layer to the story by using it to examine a New York City that had just been rocked by 9/11. Lumet, too, was a New Yorker; he worked on Broadway as a young man, and despite his prolific filmmaking career, he never left Manhattan for Hollywood. “Dog Day Afternoon” is a quintessential New York movie: The film opens with a montage of Brooklyn on the supposed hottest day of the year, and you can feel the insufferable humidity glaring in each shot. Of course it’s one of Lee’s favorite movies, as he described it to film critic Emmanuel Levy.
In that same interview, Lee said he felt that Gerwitz’s script for “Inside Man” was “a contemporary take on that kind of a movie [meaning ‘Dog Day Afternoon].” The surface-level comparisons are obvious — both are about a bank robbery escalating into a hostage situation — but the perspectives are different.
“Dog Day Afternoon” is about the robbers and their screw-ups. Most of the film is a slow-boiling pressure cooker, where Sonny knows he’s f***ed but can’t accept that yet. The movie ends with — spoilers ahead — Sal dead and Sonny arrested. “Inside Man,” though, is told from the perspective of the police, while the robbers are masked and enigmatic. (Lee told Levy that Washington sometimes found it hard to play off of the masked Clive Owen.) Rather than the heist going FUBAR the second it starts, Dalton Russell’s crew map out an intricate plan and stick to it, thus coming out on top and scott-free. “Dog Day Afternoon” is a dramedy of errors, while “Inside Man” is a slick machine of a thriller.
That’s not to downplay Lumet’s influence on Lee, though. Speaking to Vulture in 2017, Lee mentioned that he screened “Dog Day Afternoon” for his cast and crew before they made “Inside Man,” which was both a “homage” to Lumet and gave the crew an idea of what they were making. They even scored a small cameo from the original film: In “Dog Day Afternoon,” Lionel Pino plays a pizza delivery boy giving food to Sonny and his hostages:
Warner Bros.
30 years later, he played the same part in “Inside Man” (only that time, the pizza boxes had bugs inside for the police to listen in on the robbers).
Lee and Washington are teaming up again for a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “High & Low,” and I’m confident they can do that film justice the same way they did for Lumet and “Dog Day Afternoon” with “Inside Man.”
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