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"Yeah, you know what love is right?"

Al Pacino.  One of the greats.  Who gives a shit if he was in "Simone" (aka "S1m0ne").  "Dog Day Afternoon," Sydney Lumet's staggering masterpiece, is still one of my handful of all-time favorites.

The scene:  After a tumultuous afternoon, and a heavily faulted attempted bank robbery, Sonny Wortzik (Pacino) decides to call both of his wives.  The first is Leon Shermer (an Oscar nominated Chris Sarandon), a male trying to get a sex change operation.  Leon is across the street, in the barbershop overrun with cops and negotiators.  There's is a conversation about hopes, dreams and and a cloudy future.  Is there a Johnson's in Algeria?  Sonny's next call is to his wife Angie Wortzik (Susan Peretz), the robust mother of his children.  Here we see the nucleus of Sonny's turmoil as Sonny can barely nest his feelings into Angie without having to scream at her, in a desperate attempt to dilute her crying and teary-eyed demands.  Once all is said, the camera holds on Sonny as he collapses his head onto the desk he's sitting at, weeping in defeat.

Why we love it:  Pacino is a marvel to study.  Look at his eyeballs; it's almost like they're sweating in nervousness.  The phone calls themselves happen in two orchestral movements.  With Leon, the conversation is calm, almost at ease, at least in tone.  But the camera is alive.  In fact the shot of Leon getting on the phone happens in a way that makes the audience feel like a wild predator, as the camera slowly inches around a barbershop chair, through police and toward an immobile Leon.  Theirs is a conversation of star-crossed lovers (at least they used to be) but the camera is restless--almost violent.  With Angie, Lumet has the camera on a tripod, half looking down an apartment corridor and half-exposing a living room.  We wait for Angie to come into our depth of view, toward us, and it's our own eyes doing most of the work.  The camera stays put.  But the conversation between Sonny and Angie is like hot lava; it's violent.  Just watch how Sonny presses that white towel against his head at one point--it might as well be a pistol.  Lumet creates a dynamic stasis by executing these two phone conversations,  and the effect is emotionally overwhelming.

Note: It's said that while shooting, Lumet himself started to weep behind the camera once Pacino finally broke down after his phone calls.