Black Sunday

The late John Frankenheimer was one of our greatest movie directors and Black Sunday was one of his greatest films that showed him as a true master of suspense. I recently bought the DVD for the film and it still "holds up" today as well as ever. There isn't a suspense film today that can hold a candle to it just like Frankenheimer's other great film The Manchurian Candidate (I cannot believe that they are re-making it with Denzel Washington!). Robert Shaw was a truly overlooked and underused talent. He was a true Renaissance man in every sense of the word. People don't realize that he wasn't only a great actor but a playwright and novelist as well. He wrote the Broadway play The Man In The Glass Booth. He is best remembered for his role as Quint in Jaws but he gave many other fine performances as well and this is surely one as the heroic Israeli agent who has to stop a terrorist threat to kill 80,000 Superbowl fans. Watching this film in 1977 was chilling when you saw what the psychotic Vietnam vet Bruce Dern and Martha Keller were going to do. These were two terrorists who were willing to die for their cause and take thousands of innocent people with them. Watching this film today is even MORE chilling! Back when it was released, most probably thought it was too farfetched. These two terrorists were going to use an "aircraft" (in this case a Goodyear blimp) as a weapon of mass murder. DOES THIS SEEM FARFETCHED TODAY!!!!Black Sunday was made a quarter century before 9/11. As a matter of fact, when the Oklahoma City Bombing happened, CNN showed a clip of Black Sunday as an example of how Hollywood has treated the subject of domestic terrorism. It is chiling that Frankenheimer and Thoams Harris (the author of the novel who later wrote the Hannibal Lecter trilogy) could have that much foresight. All the actors in this film are awesome and what really shocked me was Fritz Weaver's heroic FBI agent (usually movies show the FBI as stupid and corrupt) Critics have often commented on the climax of the film where Lander and her take off in the blimp to set the bomb off and Kabakov and Corley try to stop them. It is the most intense and suspenseful ending you can possibly imagine and the music is awesome. The stunt people must have had a field day doing the climax where they haul the blimp out of the stadium.

Another thriller, after Two-Minute Warning (1976), about disaster at a football game.

I personally call myself a disaster movie nutcase but am just a casual fan of traditional thrillers. Well over 50% of Black Sunday can be defined as a thriller and it is not until the later sections that it gets into disaster-movie-mode. As I am a fan of Bruce Dern (he deserved top billing here!) and an even bigger fan of composer John Williams - I liked the whole movie!

Today's younger viewers might be turned off by some sections of the dated photography (rear projection all over the place) but to a middle aged viewer like me the photography was no problem.

The above mentioned John Williams score sounds more like a Jerry Goldsmith action score for Capricorn One (1978) or The Swarm (1978).

I probably like sister film - Two-Minute Warning (1976) - just a bit more but both flicks are a knockout.

John Frankenheimer gets to direct one of the biggest stars...the Goodyear blimp. An ex-Navy pilot and prisoner of war(Bruce Dern) teams with a devout member(Marthe Keller) of the Black September terrorist group to hijack/fly the Goodyear blimp and shoot a quarter million rifle darts into the Orange Bowl. Among the 80,000 football fans in attendance watching the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl X is the President of the United States. Trying to prevent the disaster is an Israeli anti-terrorist expert(Robert Shaw)who is as ruthless as the people he tracks down. This action thriller is based on the Thomas Harris novel. And accenting the action is a gripping musical score by John Williams.

Shaw is solid and determined. Dern is like a lunatic tightroping the edge of sanity. Keller is as solemn as she is fetching. In support are Fritz Weaver, Steven Keats and Bekim Fehmiu. The violence is vivid while the special effects are average for the time period.

"Black Sunday" is a nice example of how good action films used to be, before the 80s and 90s saw dumb scripts and dumb characters undermine the genre forever (films like "The Rock" for example). Instead of going for non-stop pyrotechnics, John Frankenheimer and Ernest Lehman serve up a tense, exciting build-up with interesting characters along the way that culminates in a grand finale that was partly filmed during Super Bowl X between Dallas and Pittsburgh. Robert Shaw, at long last given the chance to play the hero in a movie, is quite good as the weary Israeli agent and Bruce Dern is at his psychotic best as the deranged blimp pilot.

Black Sunday was considered a "what if" disaster movie in the '70s, although it's not a disaster movie along the lines of Earthquake!, Flood! or the others. Now of course it seems less like a "what if" movie and some of the lines of "fictional" dialogue have actually been quoted in the news recently. This is an absorbing thriller, and does not rely on the special effects that so many thrillers like "The Siege" (and probably The Sum of All Fears, which I haven't seen) employ. Too bad Robert Shaw passed at such a relatively young age--in all of the movies I've seen him in (The Sting, The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3, Jaws and this one), he created such different types of characters. I didn't even recognize him at first in this one, going from the Irish accent of Jaws to the Israeli accent in Black Sunday. John Frankenheimer gripped my attention for the whole movie, and considering its length (nearly 3 hours) this is no small feat. Even Bruce Dern, doing his usual psycho thing, was good. Highly recommended.