An intriguing, though at times stilted, attempt to weld disaster-movie theatrics onto a sober-minded espionage thriller, John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday was sold to audiences on the basis of its climactic action sequence in which a Goodyear blimp is taken over by terrorists, loaded with plastique explosives, and flown into a packed football stadium on Super Bowl Sunday. “It could be tomorrow!” the posters boldly proclaimed over an image of the blimp smashing into the floodlights of the Miami Orange Bowl as a mass of screaming fans flee in terror, promising an effects-laden thrill ride in the vein of The Towering Inferno. But while the blimp sequence that closes the film delivers on the marketing campaign’s promise of some high-flying, helium-fueled action, Frankenheimer doesn’t seem particularly interested in spectacular carnage for its own sake. Rather, he uses the film to explore the ways in which trauma and violence turn people toward terrorism.
The film opens in Lebanon, where a group of Palestinian militants from the Black September organization, including femme fatale mastermind Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller), has gathered at a Beirut compound to view footage they’ve obtained showing a captured American Navy pilot, Michael Lander (Bruce Dern), admitting to war crimes against the Vietnamese people. The grainy black-and-white images, which evoke real-life confessions of U.S. POWs filmed during the Korean War as well as Frankenheimer’s own The Manchurian Candidate, reveal a man haunted by the savage actions that he’s carried out on behalf of his country. Having been court-martialed for filming such a confession at the behest of his Viet Cong captors, Michael, we will learn, has turned against the American people and his own government.
In an elegant sequence that anticipates the low-key suspense of modern political thrillers like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Olivier Assayas’s Carlos, a Mossad unit led by Maj. David Kabakov (Robert Shaw) raids the compound with the directive to kill everyone inside. But when the notoriously ruthless Kabakov bursts in on Dahlia as she’s taking a shower, he lets her live—an act of mercy that the agent will come to regard as a moment of weakness. Dahlia returns to the U.S., where it turns out she’s living with Michael, who flies the Goodyear blimp at football games while quietly plotting with Dahlia to carry out an attack on the Super Bowl.
Ping-ponging between scenes of Michael and Dahlia’s preparations and Kabakov’s investigation, the film, which is based on Thomas Harris’s best-selling novel, is episodic in structure and slightly languid in pace. It never generates much suspense around the Mossad agent’s globetrotting detective work because the scenes of Dahlia and Michael always keep us a few steps ahead of Kabakov. But the plot is punctuated by some bravura action sequences. Particularly notable is a foot chase and shootout through the streets and beaches of Miami that crackles with a documentary-like intensity. Shot on location in fluid, deep-focus long takes with Frankenheimer’s trademark handheld camera, the sequence immerses us into the action with an immediacy that recalls Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.
But it’s Black Sunday’s sophisticated engagement with the real-world politics of its era that truly lends weight and meaning to the production. The three principal characters—Michael, Dahlia, and Kabakov—are each haunted by tragedies that have led them to embrace political violence. Michael, once a military hero, feels rejected by his country after coming home from the war in Vietnam, a situation that’s induced in him a sense of self-pitying resentment that manifests in a desire to slaughter as many Americans as possible. Unlike Michael, who’s driven by no coherent political agenda, only his rage, Dahlia is an icy political operative, unshakably dedicated to the cause of Palestinian liberation, but her commitment to Black September is borne of deep scars: The Israeli military drove her family from their homeland, forced them into a refugee camp, and killed both her parents. Black Sunday doesn’t rationalize Dahlia and Michael’s turn to terrorism, but it does suggest that violent revolutionaries like them don’t simply appear out of nowhere but rather are forged by harsh political conditions.
More boldly, the film suggests that Kabakov isn’t so different from the extremists he chases. A man who, by his own admission, has been “killing and murdering” for over 30 years, Kabakov is so pitiless in his defense of Israel that he’s been dubbed “the final solution”—a bitterly ironic nickname given that, as we can tell from the tattoo emblazoned on his arm, he’s a Holocaust survivor. The film suggests that the Mossad official’s brutality is impelled by a deep personal pain. In a scene that anticipates the angst-ridden depiction of Israeli counter-terrorism in Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Kabakov questions whether his brutality has been misbegotten, or if he’s simply losing his edge in his old age. As his right-hand man, Moshevsky (Steven Keats), tells him, “The trouble is, David, you’ve come to see both sides of the question.”
In the end, though, Black Sunday’s complex ideas about cycles of violence, moral responsibility, and the blowback of terrorism are subsumed by the requisitely grandiose finale. In contrast to the sleek, on-the-ground shootouts earlier in the film, the stuntwork, in-studio shots, and rear-projection effects that dot this climactic blowout are often clumsily executed. Frankenheimer cuts it all together with a rhythmic editing approach that’s nicely timed to John Williams’s tense, ticking-clock score, but the sequence can’t overcome the fact that much of what we’re seeing isn’t very convincing. Black Sunday is one of the more astute works on the origins of militant extremism ever made by a Hollywood studio, but when it comes to actually depicting the brutal spectacle of terrorist violence, it goes over like a lead balloon.
Image/Sound
Featuring a 1080p transfer, Imprint’s all-region Blu-ray release of John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday is acceptable though hardly ideal, bearing a number of defects that detract from the film’s overall effect. During the opening credits, the picture is squashed into a letterboxed format. Throughout the film, particularly in darker sequences, a bluish discoloration is noticeable in the center of the frame. In fact, many of the film’s moody, low-light scenes—and there are several—appear grainy and overexposed, though this may in part be an unfortunate byproduct of Frankenheimer’s fondness for the realism of shooting night for night. Thankfully, well-lit scenes are crisp and clear, with background details perfectly visible in the deep-focus frames. Imprint has provided DTS-HD Master 5.1 and LPCM stereo soundtracks, both of which are full-bodied, allowing John Williams’s propulsive yet delicately shaded score to fill the air without drowning out dialogue or background noises.
Extras
Imprint makes up for the film’s slightly flawed visual presentation with a selection of exceptionally informative and well-produced special features. Film historian Stephen Prince provides an erudite audio commentary that combines production factoids with insightful analysis of Frankenheimer’s technique and detailed comparisons to Tom Harris’s source novel. Prince positions the film as a landmark in Hollywood’s treatment of international terrorism and highlights some of the subtler ways in which Frankenheimer brought a sense of verisimilitude to his depiction of militants. A visual essay entitled “Fourth Down: Composing Black Sunday” features film music historian Daniel Schweiger discussing Williams’s subtly complex score over clips from the film that nicely illustrate his points. In “It Could Be Tomorrow: Directing Black Sunday,” film historian Stephen Armstrong places Black Sunday in the context of Frankenheimer’s oeuvre while offering a refreshingly candid take on the director’s up-and-down career. A theatrical trailer rounds out the set.
Overall
Like the film itself, Imprint’s Black Sunday Blu-ray is inconsistent, but its quality extras ultimately outweigh its less-than-perfect visual presentation.
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