Rewind, film: Dog Day Afternoon, directed by Sidney Lumet

Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning

Sidney Lumet

On a sagging shelf in my dad's dark and mysterious study, past the fraying macramé, the Ludlums, yoga manuals and The Joy of Sex, perched the tattered twin piles of his

MAD magazines. Like my father I'd grab a handful of dog-eared issues from the pile and slope off to the loo, settling in to read my favourites - Dave Berg's The Lighter Side Of, Spy vs Spy, Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions and whichever movie was being lampooned by Madison Avenue's most subversive talents.

This put me in the somewhat postmodern position of having read the MAD satires of many classic 1970s films years before I would be allowed to watch them or be fully capable of understanding them. Of all these warped masterpieces, one stood out: Dum-Dum Afternoon. I would pore over its pages, troubled and fascinated by these weird, wise-cracking, self-aware bank robbers, the cross-hatched exaggerations of Al Pacino and John Cazale - especially Cazale - and the seething cesspit of a city they inhabited.

When I finally saw Dog Day Afternoon for the first time, in the 1980s, Cazale's pale, stricken visage as Sal, the dim-witted accomplice of real-life bank robber John Wojtowicz (Pacino), had already been cemented in my brain as the archetypal scary, wild-eyed weirdo.