The true story of the real guy that Al Pacino made legendary in the bank robbing thriller Dog Day Afternoon...
The real guy, first name John, not Sonny, isn't playing with a full deck, and as he talks about going from a "warmonger" Goldwater conservative to a peacenik McCarthy democrat during and after the Vietnam war, first believing the war and later hating the war, he's forgetting that Goldwater lost to Johnson, and it was John F Kennedy and Johnson who started the Vietnam war, and Johnson who proudly sustained it, but, again, not a full deck here... and any chance a documentary can blame Republicans for everything, they'll do so...
Also, while he did kinda look like Pacino or De Niro in his youth, he is very, very hard to look at (filmed six years before his death around 2000) and the talking-dead doc camera is just way too close to his face which includes horribly damaged teeth, sickly chapped lips and a giant grotesque sty on top of his eyelid... He's just gross...
For this documentary to fit into how docs are now, he has to brag about being a gay revolutionary instead of a career criminal lowlife who robbed a bank and pointed guns at human beings...
It's very doubtful he robbed a bank with a young dangerous hoodlum (who was younger than John Cazale in the movie, and not quietly endearing but loud and scary) just for the sex change of his boyfriend to girlfriend...
He robbed the bank to have a load of money... He didn't just take the amount needed for a sex change... He wanted a lot of money the fast way...
But like all left wing docs, a genuine scumbag is turned into a kind of anti-hero, which isn't the doc's fault since Lumet's classic Dog Day Afternoon did the same thing, only it was entertaining, and shockingly the FBI are also made to look decently enough....
Overall THE DOG is an interesting viewing and a way to pass the time, it's just a bit too idolizing of someone who was a criminal and continued to be a criminal. But, that's show biz...
The truth is, though... neither Pacino or Lumet wanted anything to do with this kook, ever, even when he got out of and back into jail for the rest of his troubled life.
