It
was late in the Lindsay administration. New York really was becoming the grungy
crime-ridden vice pit largely sustained by attitude people remember with such
strange fondness. John Wojtowicz helped paint that picture. True, there is more
to his story than the ill-fated bank robbery immortalized in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, but there is no
getting around that notorious incident in Brooklyn. Wojtowicz speaks for
posterity (and he is not shy about it) in Allison Berg & Frank Keraudren’s The Dog (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
For
the record, Wojtowicz did his time in Lewistown, not Attica. Arguably, he was a
something of a gay marriage pioneer, wedding his lover Ernest Aron (subsequently
known as Liz Debbie Eden) in a Catholic-aping ceremony. It was a troubled
union, mostly because of Aron’s discomfort living as a man. Initially,
Wojtowicz opposed the gender re-assignment surgery, but he eventually relented.
Of course, that would cost money. Recruiting two accomplices from the scene,
Wojtowicz hatched a very half-baked plan.
The
late Wojtowicz (adopting the moniker of “The Dog”) sounds every bit the tough
talking, unapologetic New Yorker viewers would expect. His interviews dominate
Berg & Keraudren’s film, for obvious reasons. They also evoke plenty of the
era’s seedy atmosphere, while documenting the early years of New York gay
activism. It definitely has value as a time capsule, but it does little to
burnish Lindsay’s reputation.
In
addition to Wojtowicz, Berg & Keraudren talk to nearly all of the surviving
principles, including his first “legal” wife, Carmen Bifulco, and George Heath,
the third wife Wojtowicz met in prison. Clearly, the man was not shy or
commitment phobic. Unfortunately, Eden and Lindsay have long since passed.
