Based on the debut novel by Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs), co-written by Ernst Lehman (North By Northwest), Ivan Moffat (Giant) and Kenneth Ross (The Day of the Jackal), and directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate), Black Sunday has a remarkable pedigree for a thriller.
Like The Day of the Jackal, Black Sunday sets out the villains’ plot and then cross-cuts between the perpetrators and the investigators until they meet at the climax.
An idea I could not shake was how this movie would look if it was made twenty years later - in its scale and premise, Black Sunday feels like a nineties thriller, like In The Line of Fire or Speed.
The idea of villains attacking a popular aspect of American pop culture was popular in the nineties - think the destruction of the White House in Independence Day and the Die Hard-with-the-President high concept of Air Force One.
Black Sunday, with elements of the action and disaster genres, feels like an early predecessor to those kinds of masochistic(?) entertainment.
The cast are mostly middle-aged character actors, and the film tries to avoid mythologising - this is not an action film or a disaster epic (despite some superficial similarities).
The film tries to combine a fetishization of process and investigation with a character piece. This does mean the movie feels like it wants to have its cake and eat it.
Marthe Keller’s Dahlia is both a victim of the Nakba who bursts into tears before they start the plan into motion, and a cold-blooded femme fatale who seduces Lander and played to his paranoia.
Robert Shaw’s Kabakov is the ultimate veteran warrior whose nickname is ‘The Final Solution’. He is also Holocaust survivor who has been demoralised by thirty years of war. Despite this, he is a man of action whose willingness to break any rule (what would become a cliche in American cop action movies) wins out over the Americans’ more by-the-book approach.
This aspect of the film feels like it would never past muster in the nineties or today. The willingness to give even this level of shading to these characters feels bizarrely progressive compared with the cartoonish supervillains of later, similar movies.
In the last hour, Black Sunday finally becomes the suspense thriller as advertised.
Shooting with handheld cameras, Frankenheimer presents the film like a docu-drama. The film benefits from a strong sense of verisimilitude - the film shot during real football games, and included shots of Robert Shaw and Fritz Weaver on the sidelines with the players and crowded stands behind them. There is a even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo from a fake Jimmy Carter.
More significantly, Goodyear let the filmmakers shoot the real blimps, which means fewer process shots. The use of the real blimp pays other dividends - not only do we get money shots of the blimp close to the stadium, we have real stunt men dangling from helicopters, trying to land on the back of the blimp. Shot in long shots, with few process inserts, and John Williams’ score pounding in the background, it is genuinely exhilarating.
From the standoff between the hijackers and the ground crew, to the blimp’s final crash landing, the third act elevates the movie.
While the third act thriller mechanics are terrific, I left Black Sunday pondering the limits of the film’s fidelity to authenticity. The movie came out after almost a decade of plane hijackings, the Yom Kippur War, and the oil embargo which followed. It is hard to not to read the film as a nightmare scenario for the xenophobia and racism of the time, and which have only continued in the decades since.
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