Black Sunday
**This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
One of the things I’ve come to notice about John Frankenheimer is that he has empathy for veterans and the military. We hope that everyone does, but in films like “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Seven Days in May” and “Black Sunday,” he has varying portraits of either current soldiers (or ex-soldiers) whose lives away from the battlefield has been a struggle. Whether it’s because of events that happened during the war, anxieties about how the next war will start, or soldiers who came back completely broken, what they do during the film may not always be morally right, but we always understand why they’re doing it, and we empathize.
“Black Sunday” is the most preposterous of Frankenheimer’s thrillers that I’ve seen, but it also makes me think that he would have been a great collaborator with Tom Cruise on a “Mission: Impossible” film. While his adaptation of Thomas Harris’s 1975 novel takes some time to get the plot going, it still moves like a firecracker for each of its 143 minutes. The climax is certifiably insane in a way the rest of Hollywood would make a staple in the next decade of action films, but the way Frankenheimer keeps the film’s cat-and-mouse focused on the characters, even as the action ramps up, has me thinking he would have crushed an Ethan Hunt adventure.
Harris’s terrorist plot is inspired by the tragic Munich massacre at the 1972 Olympics, which is also mentioned in the story itself. “Black Sunday” is not terribly interested in the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though; it’s just the backdrop for this story of a member of Black September- the terrorist organization behind Munich- who enlists a former military pilot to send a message to the world. On their heels is a Mossad agent who has tracked the woman from the Middle East.
When we first meet him, Michael Lander (Bruce Dern) is in a video being shown to members of Black September. His words are of a man who feels betrayed by his government, whose time at war, and as a prisoner of war, has radicalized him. It’s Frankenheimer’s way of acknowledging the pain of those disillusioned after Vietnam. At home, Lander’s family has left him. He has parlayed his piloting skills to flying the Goodyear blimp for sporting events. When we first see him doing that, he misses a big shot and gets in trouble for it. For Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller), he is an ideal candidate, but when her meeting with Black September is interrupted by a Mossad team led by counter-terrorist agent David Kabokov (Robert Shaw), she inadvertently leaves behind a message making Kabokov aware to her plans. But it will not be until both are stateside- Dahlia with Lander and Kabokov working with FBI agent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver)- that we get an idea of what is happening.
The screenplay by Ernest Lehman, Kenneth Ross and Ivan Moffat is fairly streamlined and straightforward as we follow Lander, Dahlia, Kabokov and Corley as the story unfolds. Ultimately, all of the characters are fairly one-dimensional in their complexity and motivations; what drives the film is Frankenheimer’s command of cinematic narrative, and his ability to make dialogue scenes crackle with purpose. To bring this film to life, he managed to get the cooperation of both Goodyear and the NFL so that he could stage the film’s climax of Lander and Dahlia looking to crash the Goodyear blimp into the Super Bowl. Frankenheimer stages the sequence with his typical blend of craft and suspense, and gets a big, booming score from John Williams to match. It’s a great sequence, but also a ridiculous one- the first of many insane action climaxes Hollywood would give us over the next 46 years. Few would deliver the goods quite like Frankenheimer. He would have been a great fit for Cruise’s spy franchise. “Black Sunday” is a strong precursor to what action films became after it.
