Black Sunday (1977) – Film Review

Director: John Frankenheimer
Cast: Robert Shaw, Bruce Dern, Marthe Keller
Certificate: 15

By Sarah Morgan

What links Jaws, Alfred Hitchcock and Hannibal Lecter?

The film Black Sunday, that’s what. Its leading man is Robert Shaw, who made the film while basking in the glory of Steven Spielberg’s monster shark movie, while Ernest Lehman, who also penned North by Northwest and Family Plot (among many other scripts in a long and distinguished career) co-wrote the screenplay, which was based on a novel by Thomas Harris, whose most famous book is The Silence of the Lambs.

Now, I’m certainly not going to suggest that these combined talents managed to create something that surpasses in terms of quality and entertainment any of their more famous works, but Black Sunday is undoubtedly among the best thrillers of the 1970s, which is no mean feat when you consider the decade also produced the likes of Dirty Harry, The Day of the Jackal and The French Connection.

“Mentally scarred”

The story was inspired by the horrifying events at the 1972 Munich Olympics, when 11 members of the Israeli team were killed after being kidnapped by the Black September militant organisation; the terrorists themselves also died, as did a West German police officer.

Marthe Keller plays Dahlia, a member of Black September, who has orchestrated a relationship with airship pilot Michael Lander (Bruce Dern), a Vietnam veteran left mentally scarred by his years as a prisoner of war.

Lander is suicidal and fantasises about killing himself and as many civilians as possible. He’s also madly in love with Dahlia, so is the perfect person for her to manipulate into carrying out a deadly attack on the crowd attending the Super Bowl in Miami. The idea is to use the airship he’ll be flying above the stadium as a deadly weapon, allowing them to wipe out as many of the 80,000 spectators as possible, as well as themselves.

However, Israeli counter-terrorist Mossad agent David Kabakov (Shaw) and FBI agent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) join forces to put a stop to the plan, resulting in an incredibly audacious climax to the tale.

“Remember to breathe”

John Frankenheimer, who had already proved himself to be a master of the thriller genre thanks to his work on the likes of the original version of The Manchurian Candidate and French Connection II, handles the action brilliantly, wringing every last drop of tension out of the plot. He particularly deserves plaudits for the set pieces around the stadium, which were filmed during the real 1976 Super Bowl – it can’t have been easy to control such an excited crowd.

Of course, it helps when actors of Shaw, Dern and Keller are around. They’re the most famous cast members, but nobody puts a foot wrong here – just make sure to remember to breathe as the pressure mounts in the closing minutes.

Sarah Morgan( Writer )

Sarah Morgan studied film journalism at post-graduate level with the BFI and has been writing about TV and film for PA Media’s newspaper, magazine and new media customers since 1996. She’s also written for a wide range of other publications, both online and in print, including the book Offbeat and Intermission magazine, and is a regular contributor to the Talking Pictures TV podcast. When she isn’t watching movies, she’s collecting and reading vintage crime and horror paperback books or, for her sins, watching her beloved Sheffield Wednesday.

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