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.

While Black Sunday may not be considered an actual classic, it's still the most edge of your seat movie I've ever seen! I was definetly glued to the TV the first time that I saw this film. It's a shame this movie didn't turn out to be a huge success, because I think it's very underrated. Next to Jaws and From Russia With Love, this is one of Robert Shaw's finest performances. It's too bad he passed away while he was probably in the heyday of his film career. Bruce Dern also gives a great performance as a disturbed Vietnam Vet turned blimp pilot who becomes an aid for the terrorist plot on the Super Bowl. The film should be considered very well-maid for it's time when they didn't have the special effects like they do today. The aerial shots were fantastic as was the ability to combine the football scenes in the movie. I recommend this thriller even though the first hour had it's share of dull moments, but you can't deny that the climax was a nailbiter.

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.

I'm a sucker for movies with blimps and hot air balloons (from Jules Verne to James Bond). A movie where the Goodyear Blimp plays a major role is right up my alley. But that's not all. This is one of the most realistic political thrillers ever filmed. Each actor regardless of the size of role in this film simply blows away most of what passes for acting today. Frankenheimer's direction (style later copied on Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue) was perhaps ten to fifteen years ahead of its time, and the editing at times perhaps second only to Jaws and maybe a Hitchcock film or two (though it does slow down in the middle). This is a film where the obvious villain, played by a colorful Bruce Dern, is the central character driving the story, and Robert Shaw's underplayed hero somewhat of an antagonist getting in the way. Dern's character is not glorified (as many of that film era were such as in Bonnie and Clyde, The Sting, and Butch Cassidy). The camera is there so we may understand his character without romanticism or sympathy. We are left to make up our own mind about his villainy, and Dern's performance leaves little to question that he is a deranged lunatic. Perhaps this is why the film is not so known today. Vietnam vets returning home was a fairly new topic for films at the time (ironically "Coming Home" with Bruce Dern as a sympathetic vet was the first big film about this subject). The "crazed Viet Vet" became a stereotype and politically incorrect. It is too bad this film was lumped into that group, because it is as good as a thriller can get. Next to "Jaws," this is Shaw's best performance. This is a film that can be watched over and over because it is so complex. I recommend buying the film as opposed to renting it, so you can savor it like a good wine.

"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.