P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore’s LIFE Magazine article “The Boys in the Bank,” reporting on a real-life 1972 hostage situation in a Brooklyn bank branch, became an Oscar-winning screenplay by Frank Pierson. Mining both the humor and tension of the standoff, Lumet went on location to re-create it, piloting his Serpico star Al Pacino to another iconic performance. Vincent Canby praised the film as “beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city’s sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer.”