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.