10 Most Sympathetic Movie Kidnappers And Hostage Takers

9. Sonny Wortznik And Sal Naturale - Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

It€™s quite a jump from the ruthlessness of Wild West desperadoes to the nebbish-like haplessness of Sonny (Al Pacino, above) and Sal (the late John Cazale). But it€™s a leap that the Brooklyn bank robbers make with a kind of heroism, reflecting the cuddlier status of the movie antihero by the mid-70s. How else could Sonny get the excited crowd outside the bank to chant "Attica! Attica!", as if he was a countercultural hero taking the establishment to task? The fact that he€™s a clueless amateur thief holding the bank staff hostage in the hope of a big payoff doesn€™t stop him evoking the 1971 Attica prison riot where the authorities shot dead 33 inmates (ten guards and civilian workers died too, but Attica remained a radical byword for oppression). The natural terror felt by Chase Manhattan bank workers, as the robbery went wrong and the two raiders barricaded themselves inside with the staff as hostages, was later mitigated by a sense that these two guys were not exactly killer material. The Brooklyn robbery that inspired the film took place on 22 August, 1972, but it was a similar event in Sweden exactly one year later that explains how the clerks and tellers could come to see their captors as benign. The term €˜Stockholm syndrome€™ was coined after the Kreditbanken robbery siege of 23-28 August 1973. In a remarkable parallel with the events in Brooklyn, bank staff locked in a vault by raiders came to identify with the hostage-takers, even taking their part in negotiations with the authorities. According to psychologist Frank Ochberg, who coined the now-famous term, Stockholm syndrome surfaces from a sense of overwhelming gratitude that the captors haven€™t realised their captives€™ worst fears, which makes them seem somehow closer to friends than tormentors. It€™s this emotional trade-off that allows head teller €˜Sylvia the Mouth€™, in Dog Day Afternoon, to act relatively benignly towards Sonny and Sal even after they use her as a human shield in their talks with police - that and the sense that the robbers are too inept and not ruthless enough to truly command their situation. It€™s a double-irony that John Wojtowicz, the real-life Sonny, later claimed to have prepared for the true-life robbery by studying a scene from The Godfather: not only does that gangster epic not contain any robbery scenes but the screen version of Wojtowicz would be portrayed by Pacino, now a star after playing Michael in The Godfather Parts I and II. The haplessness of the robbers was disputed, with one Greenwich Village journalist claiming the heist was really a professional, Mafia-backed operation. Wojtowicz, later serving a 20-year sentence, also complained that the cops€™ shooting of his friend Sal in the film€™s closing scenes suggested he€™d set his buddy up. What€™s indisputable is that these guys were no run-of-the-mill hoodlums €“ which appealed to director Sidney Lumet, who often couched his own liberalism in topical New York crime stories. While holding the unharmed hostages as bargaining chips, both in the movie and in actuality, among Wortznik€™s/Wojtowicz€™s demands were that his transsexual girlfriend should be brought to the scene. The robbery, it was suggested, was to pay for her realignment surgery. "I guess he€™s not the Godfather after all," observed one of the female hostages in Mad Magazine€™s parody strip, Dum-Dum Afternoon.