Dear Jack Rabbit, you don't know what you're talking about. The police did not wait until Sandro had killed someone before shooting him. 1) They did not shoot him but suffocated him, while he was in their custody, unarmed. 2) It was a police officer's completely unwarranted attempt to shoot him that caused the death of the hostage: one of the police bullets hit the hostage in the face, in the mellee Sandro's gun discharged into her back. Had the police not shot, the hostage would still be alive. Dog Day Afternoon was, of course, based on an actual incident, and in as much as some hostage incident resemble others then this two films are vaguely comparable. What happened in both cases was that a bond was formed between the hostages and the kidnappers. However, the motives in the two cases were completely different, Sonny was after money to finance a sex change operation, and he was part of a team, not the loner that Sandro was, and of course the negotiation processes were completely different as were the outcomes. Moreover the crowd reactions and social context could not be more different - the crowd in DDA were anti-police on the whole (anti-Vietnam war demo era) and side with Sonny; in Bus 174 they had a racist hatred of the high-jacker and just wanted the police to shoot him - as it seems you did. Lumet is one of my favourite film-makers (Network an astonishingly and frightening prescient film) but I find it rather offensive that you should suggest that a film he made in New York in 1975 could in any way anticipate or foreshadow what happened in Rio more than twenty years later. This is just the kind of crass American cultural imperialism and arrogance that Lumet himself would never tolerate. You do capture the spirit of US foreign policy well though: shoot the bastards before they can hurt anyone (cf Iraq). That was not the message of the film, and only a very insensitive viewer could believe it was.
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