Black Sunday (1977)

A Palestinian terror cell have managed to recruit embittered and more than a little crazy blimp pilot Lander (Bruce Dern). Lander has a big plan: blowing up the traditional Goodyear blimp hovering over the stadium during Super Bowl, and killing as many people as possible with some godawful shrapnel contraption he has invented. The very volatile Lander is handled by Dahlia (Marthe Keller), whose job it is to cajole, mother and fuck Lander to keep him from imploding as well as from going on some kind of murderous suicide run before its proper time and place. She’s also going to help him with various preparation and clean-up missions.

A rather very early tape that claims responsibility for some huge and violent yet vaguely described deed in the USA makes its way into the hands of Mossad agent Kabakov (Robert Shaw) who soon travels to the US to get the FBI as embodied by the not terribly competent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) on point and try to find out what exactly is supposed to happen. If they will manage to get to Lander and Marthe on time is anyone’s guess.

To my eyes, John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday is a bit of an underappreciated classic. Slow-moving at first, this turns into the kind of paranoid and increasingly intense thriller Frankenheimer was so good at, until everything climaxes in a of finale of a style you simply couldn’t do anymore today. The amount of access Frankenheimer must have gotten to the Super Bowl is truly astonishing, particularly when one keeps in mind that the plot isn’t exactly the sort of thing any company would see as great advertisement. That Frankenheimer used that access to embed a series of absolutely crazy and improbable stunts in documentarian reality certainly makes the film’s finale very special indeed.

But even before that, Black Sunday often feels convincing in a way Michael Mann would – most probably does – appreciate, showing characters doing the planning and thinking parts of their generally dirty work as well as their plans’ execution in greater detail than a more streamlined film would, thereby creating a feeling of reality that helps build tension as well as, perhaps better than, simple, tight, suspense would.

Politically, the film is rather interesting as well, for in its world, everybody, independent of political stripe, is pretty horrible in one way or the other. To all characters in Black Sunday, the use of violence as part of politics has become so decoupled from any actual goals that violence now is the end as well as the tool of politics. None of the characters here come away looking good: Marthe and Kabakov are brutal sides of the same coin, Corley is incompetent, ineffective and helpless in the face of the violence, and Landers is so broken, even someone as hardboiled as Marthe has moments when she’s visibly afraid of him.

Even so, Frankenheimer also goes out of his way to repeatedly give each and every character some kind of human grounding, scenes when reactions to violence seen and committed are clear on the actors’ faces; thus, while the stunt work is often incredible and brutal, the violence never becomes cool or admirable but carries an undercurrent of terror and horror not many directors working in this realm could or would want to get away with. There’s a bitterness at the state of the world here that replaces any attempts at being patriotic or jingoistic, leaving Black Sunday with a disturbing air that puts it back to back with the great paranoid thrillers of the 70s, even though it gets there via a somewhat different route than the more obvious entries into that cycle.