THE SCREEN
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
HERO WORSHIP THE SCREEN The heroes of Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon and Sydney Pollack's The Three Days of the Condor are about as like as ... well, about as like as dogs and condors. Short,...
...Joe and Sonny are suffering instead of us...
...think tank where he works...
...After all, Joe is no more a C.I.A...
...At the end of Dog Day Afternoon Sonny has been taken into custody, while at the end of The Three Days of the Condor Joe is still a fugitive...
...The man behind the raid on Joe's think tank proves to be Joe's own section chief, who is running a private espionage network that Joe's research accidentally threatens to uncover...
...But the distinction seems a specious one...
...Like Sonny, Joe eventually winds up with the whole system against him...
...That's what sacrificial goats are for...
...If we can watch Sonny or Joe get handled thjp way, our anxiety that it might happen to us is relieved...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Readers should send help to: Sister M. Carola, A.C., Avila Convent, Bayley Road, Patna- 800001, Bihar, India (Airmail: 26c...
...What each of these films is about, then, is not condors or dogs, but the sacrificial goat-that oddball or over-achiever chosen at random from our midst to serve us as victim...
...The paddies and fields on which this community of 200 grew its own food have been devastated, and walls and all sorts of essential facilities are badly damaged...
...agent than Sonny is a bank robber...
...Perhaps that's even the point about them...
...While the one hunkers down in besieged confusion inside his bank full of hostages, the other is out loose simultaneously exposing and foiling an international conspiracy...
...Joe continues to luck out, guess right and live by his wits...
...AN APPEAL FROM PATNA Avila Convent, which conducts a college, a high school, a technical school and a primary school, has been flooded by a tributary of the Ganges...
...While Sonny is committing his stickup during the opening scenes, he burns the bank's register so the stolen bills can't be traced, and the smoke brings down the cops on him...
...They're a form of social pathology...
...The costs of needed reconstruction are heavy...
...Short, dark, ethnic Al Pacino plays the dog, Sonny, a bank robber who gets caught in the act...
...In a way Joe is an even more pathetic, helpless figure than Sonny because Joe hasn't done anything to provoke the powers that turn on him...
...It's just pure bad luck...
...Sonny continues to take pipe, guess wrong and screw up...
...What makes it even more ridiculous is that he needs $2500-to buy a sex-change operation for his homosexual wife-and the neighborhood branch he's robbing doesn't have that much...
...The forces conspiring against Joe are so great and he is so utterly alone that we hold out no hope for him...
...Acting in our places, Joe and Sonny do us honor, for they both put up a good fight just as goats should, in order to be told from the sheep...
...Joe may even be a natural at it, where Sonny is a dud But at base Joe and Sonny are both still just a couple of amateurs...
...Perhaps the function that films like these have is to let us enjoy in a fictitious version something we fear too much in reality...
...The compound is covered with water neck deep...
...It's just pure good luck this time, and what makes Joe's situation even more ridiculous is that he's the one the assassins were really after...
...Whatever the function is that such films have, however, no mere film critic can really understand it...
...Tall, auburnmaned, Wasp Robert Redford plays the condor, Joe, a C.I.A...
...whiz kid who goes out in the cold...
...With this opening incident as its premise, each film proceeds accordingly...
...Joe, on the other hand, happens to be out to lunch when assassins murder everyone else in the C.I.A...
...All a critic can know about is film art, and on the level where these films operate, movies are no longer an art form...
...Yet in the end perhaps Joe and Sonny aren't so different...
...On the contrary, he was just trying to do his job and get along...
...Joe may show a certain flair for dangerous living that Sonny doesn't have...
...The differences in the fortunes of these two men seems apparent right from the start...
...and once Joe has found this out, the fact that he knows it makes him an "embarrassment" to the agency itself, which now joins the hired assassins in the hunt for him...
...This is the daily beast lurking in each film's title, the beast our national psyche needs to slay everyday in order to carry on, the answer to our prayer, which is to give us each day our daily beast...
Vol. 102 • October 1975 • No. 16
