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| Courtesy of Paramount Pictures |
It goes without saying John Frankenheimer was one of the
greatest and most skillful technical filmmakers of action-adventure political
thriller films who ever lived. From The
Manchurian Candidate in 1962 to Ronin in 1998, Frankenheimer has
enjoyed an illustrious filmmaking career and debatably paved the way for many
kindred action films that would dominate multiplexes in the 70s and 80s. After directing the sequel to William
Friedkin’s Best Picture winner The French Connection in 1975,
Frankenheimer shifted his sights on perhaps his most ambitious project from a
purely technical end since his racecar drama Grand Prix: an adaptation
of The Silence of the Lambs novelist Thomas Harris’ guerilla warfare
thriller Black Sunday.
Israeli agent Major Kabakov (Robert Shaw) is on a secret mission to try and avert a terrorist attack plot on American soil being perpetrated by Palestinian terrorist Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller) and her unhinged lover Vietnam War POW Michael Lander (Bruce Dern) who after being court martialed is bent on bitter revenge against his country of origin. The plan is for Lander to pilot a Goodyear Blimp over the NFL Super Bowl in the Orange Bowl, Miami, which is actually loaded with explosives intending to kill some 80,000 patrons instantly. The only person standing in their way is Kabakov who will stop at nothing and use any means necessary to track down and hopefully prevent a terrible catastrophic disaster from occurring.
Not to be confused with Mario Bava’s film of the same name, inspired by the Munich massacre later dramatized in full by Steven Spielberg and posited somewhere between Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate with its political thrills involving an American who is brainwashed by communist powers before being sent back to America as a ticking time bomb and his race car sports photography employed in Grand Prix, Black Sunday is a taut and increasingly tense race-against-the-clock nailbiter with one of the most incredible action set pieces ever attempted by the director. Produced with the full cooperation of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company who granted the filmmaker the use of three of their working blimps with some minor concessions, the film despite occasional reliance on rear screen projections is a remarkably realistic action-adventure thriller.
Lensed handsomely in mostly handheld panoramic widescreen by Chinatown and Scarface cinematographer John A. Alonzo, Black Sunday represents bravura technical filmmaking on every level including but not limited to helicopter shots that feel like elegant crane shots, it also allows Frankenheimer more liberal use of the handheld docudrama aesthetic. Then there’s legendary Jaws and Star Wars composer John Williams who contributes the most nerve-wracking score of his career second to Oliver Stone’s JFK, ratcheting up the excitement and tension to a fever pitch.
Performance wise, the film basically boils down to the three characters of Marthe Keller’s terrorist, Bruce Dern’s certifiable blimp pilot and a beardless and stoic Robert Shaw all giving pitch perfect performances. The one who really goes all the way out on a limb is of course Bruce Dern who was almost too good at doing the bulging crazy eyes with a fiery, impassioned and almost raging performance. Marthe Keller is also very strong as the Palestinian terrorist, at once a stunningly beautiful woman while also being the ruthless and cunning mastermind behind the whole thing and Quentin Tarantino cited her character as influential on Elle Driver in the first Kill Bill volume.
Released in 1977 alongside the sniper football stadium thriller Two-Minute Warning which Frankenheimer claims hurt his film’s box office returns, Black Sunday went on to gross $15 million against an $8 million budget and opened to mostly positive if not mixed reception. Years later, while overshadowed in name by Mario Bava’s 1960 horror film, John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday on its terms is an indelible seat gripper, a nerve-wracking experience which also shared in the themes of Thomas Harris’ own The Silence of the Lambs. Though they couldn’t be more different, both stories suggest efforts to combat violence overseas will invariably generate more of it in response. Late into the film, a fellow operative remarks to Kabakov in regards to terrorist Dahlia ‘in a way she’s your creation’, a chilling statement about our own unknowing complicity in the production of people who eventually will want to kill us.
--Andrew Kotwicki
