Black Sunday
Robert Gold
Black Sunday is a high-concept picture that works in spades with its white-knuckle Super Bowl finale and Frankenheimer’s masterful direction.
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Horror DNA
A team of Mossad agents led by Major David Kabakov knocks out a Black September terrorist cell in Beirut and uncovers a plot to attack the United States. The leader of the cell escapes, as does a mysterious woman named Dahlia, whom Kabakov spared, a decision he will come to regret. The upcoming terror plot involves Michael Lander, a troubled Vietnam vet, now a pilot for the Goodyear company, who along with Dahlia, will load the famous blimp with explosives and fly it into the Super Bowl in Miami. Can Kabakov track them down in time or will this be the largest terrorist attack on American soil?

With titles like The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Airport and Earthquake!, disaster movies were all the rage in the 1970s. These pictures were a great source of escapism from real-world nightmares, including inflation and an oil crisis. In his debut novel Black Sunday, author Thomas Harris (The Silence of the Lambs) created a chilling scenario where the infamous terrorist organization Black September, responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics tragedy, turns their attention to the United States. The book was a hit, but critics found the idea of a domestic terror attack ludicrous. The movie version released in 1977 is sensational, but when watched through twenty-first century eyes carries a far more ominous effect.

Looking back on older movies, people sometimes say, “They could never make that today.” Black Sunday is a movie that quite simply could never be made today for the simple reason of clearances and licensing challenges. Somehow, Paramount Pictures managed to pull off the impossible – multiple times. First, they got permission to use the Goodyear blimp, by name, as part of a potential terrorist attack. The company was hesitant but agreed with some minor stipulations, primarily concerning marketing and some script tweaks. The even bigger coup was getting permission to film the Super Bowl, complete with actors on the field during the game. The NFL is notoriously protective of its footage and image, and somehow the studio also scored the approval of both the managers and owners of the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers, all of the players, and the city of Miami as a location!

Black Sunday has a lot going for it on both sides of the camera; it was produced by Robert Evans (Chinatown, The Godfather), directed by John Frankenheimer (Prophecy, The Manchurian Candidate) and written for the screen by Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest, West Side Story), Ivan Moffat (Giant) and Kenneth Ross (The Day of the Jackal). The editor Tom Rolf (Taxi Driver, Heat) successfully creates one suspenseful sequence after another to the riveting conclusion and the cinematography by John A. Alonso (Chinatown, Harold & Maude) is jaw-dropping.

The cast is headlined by Robert Shaw (Jaws) as Kabakov, Bruce Dern (Family Plot) as Mike Lander and Marthe Keller (Marathon Man) as Dahlia. There is not a wrong note in these three performances, with Dern showing the widest range of emotion. Shaw is intense as always and Keller is quite the femme fatale. Supporting players include Fritz Weaver (Creepshow) as Agent Corley, Steven Keats (Death Wish) as Moshevsky, Berkin Fehmiu (The Executioner) as Mohammad Fasil and the great Michael V. Gazzo (Alligator) as Muzi – and all are wonderful.

This movie was released at an interesting time in cinema in that it came after the all-star Two Minute Warning, a thriller about a sniper terrorizing a football game and just before Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind drove global audiences into a science fiction frenzy – and like those latter two pictures, it features a score by John Williams. Black Sunday is a high-concept picture that works in spades with its white-knuckle Super Bowl finale and Frankenheimer’s masterful direction. This is a terrific movie that remains relevant and like its tagline, “It could be tomorrow!”