Black Sunday

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.

For years down to this day since seeing Black Sunday in the theater I've always watched major sporting events with this film in mind. That's the kind of thoughts that director John Frankenheimer plants in your mind with a viewing of Black Sunday.

Black September the Palestinian terrorist organization of the day and the ones responsible for the slaughter of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich have something special in mind for America at one of our major sporting events. Israeli intelligence Mosad learns of it and the guy who learned of it is dispatched to the USA to stop it.

Robert Shaw is the agent that is sent and he gives a carefully controlled performance of an Israeli assassin. The kind you send out after Arab assassins. Shaw is quiet and deadly and most effective in his acting.

The other side is represented by Marthe Keller and note that she's not a traditional Moslem woman in her style of living. Nonetheless both she and Shaw have suffered immense personal tragedies which has brought them to their respective positions. Keller has found a former Navy Pilot who was a Vietnam POW Bruce Dern who is more than slightly unhinged. After a court-martial he's bitter against the USA and wants to commit an atrocity and he has a very specific atrocity in mind.

All three of the leads acquit themselves well in their roles. But the real star is the special effects and an ending that for the last half hour will have you on the edge of your seats.

I predict your reaction to Black Sunday will be the same as mine. You will never watch a major sporting event without this film in the back of your mind.

There are a number of good things going for this film, among them two things you learn right from the opening credits: (1) John Frankenheimer is the director and (2) it's based on a book by Thomas Harris, the man who created "Hannibal Lechter."

Throw in two intense always-interesting actors, Bruce Dern and Marthe Keller, and you now have a good, no-nonsense story translated to the screen. By that, I mean that when people are shot, that's it, no questions asked, no stupid talking.

Even the football scenes were real-life with actual footage of the Cowboys and Steelers playing in a past Super Bowl.

The suspense was done well, although a bit hokey at the very end (can't say more without spoiling it) but it can't take away from the previous two-plus hours of credibility.

Dern also makes for a good "psycho" (he's almost made a career of it) and Keller is convincing as a villain, too, as she was in a film from the previous year: Marathon Man. Two other consistently- good actors also help make this an interesting film: Robert Shaw and Fritz Weaver.

It was nice to see this film on a widescreen DVD but the picture was a bit grainy. The transfer was okay, but could have been better. The film is worthy of a top- notch print.

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.