In 1964, John Frankenheimer directed this amazing movie titled The Train, which shows various factions in Europe trying to steal, or prevent the theft of, treasures looted by the Nazis. There’s a jaw-dropping scene where two trains collide head-on and this was accomplished by really smashing full-sized locomotives together.
Roughly 15 years later, his Black Sunday depicts the Goodyear blimp exploding in a far less spectacular manner. Even without watching the moment frame-by-frame, you can tell there is an almost subliminal image that looks like pieces of a picture of the blimp all separated a bit from each other, followed by a cut to a fireball. This is a subpar effect, even by the standards of the time.
It is surprising a major studio released this. It’s even more surprising it was filmed at an actual Super Bowl, so we get some glimpses of the line-ups of the Steelers and Cowboys. Then there is Goodyear, which inexplicably allowed for the blimp that is their corporate image to be used as a potential instrument of mass destruction at that event.
Marthe Keller plays a Palestinian agent who intends to explode the blimp inside the stadium as a warning for the US to stop providing guns to Israel. As I write this, we’re in the middle of an escalated conflict between Israel and Gaza, so it saddened me a bit to think we’re still in relatively the same situation almost 50 years later.
She has recruited Bruce Dern for this suicide mission. He is a highly-respected pilot for Goodyear, following a distinguished military career in Vietnam. We gradually learn the various elements that led to his present mental state and his feelings of betrayal towards his country. He had been a POW in Nam and his wife served him divorce papers a month after he was released. I wasn’t sure if his assessment of the situation was correct, but he claims the official who repeatedly visited his wife to deliver news of his captivity was secretly putting the moves on her all that time. Ouch.
Heading the American operation is Robert Shaw. I thought he was a US agent, but I only learned after the fact that he was an Israeli agent. All I know is he at no point says “We’re gonna need a bigger blimp” or “We’re gonna need a bigger Super Bowl stadium”, which are missed opportunities.
He meets Keller early on while on a mission in Beirut where he and his soldiers kill everybody in a house except her. This is one of those times when chivalry is misplaced. It is also chauvinist, as I presume his thinking is along the lines of, “She’s just a woman. She couldn’t possibly have a weapon nearby and, even if she did, she couldn’t do anything to us.” And yet they still blow up the house with her presumably still in it, which seems even more cruel. Why not mercifully shoot somebody outright instead of potentially putting them through vastly more pain courtesy of injuries they might incur in the explosion?
There are many action sequences, some of which are better than others. There’s an especially interesting bit where Dern and Keller are on a small boat evading two large police vessels. They get away by squeaking under a lowered train drawbridge.
Their secret cargo on the boat is a great quantity of plastic explosive shaped and painted to resemble statues of the Virgin Mary. Other than for this purpose, statues like this are only used in movies for transporting concealed drugs. Does anybody in a film ever have one of these things for a legitimate reason?
There’s an interesting, yet cruel, scene where Dern and Keller do a test explosion in a hangar in the middle of nowhere. Arriving unexpectedly in a prop plane, they are greeted by an unassuming security guard whom they easily deceive with a tale of potential investment in the property. They just have to take some photos. Their high-tech bomb looks like some sort of computer equipment, and they pass this off as being a camera, putting in on a tripod in the hanger. The poor guard offers to pose alongside the plane parked within, just to give a sense of perspective. He’s curious if it’s too dark in there and asks if the “camera” has a flash. “It sure does,” Dern enthusiastically replies.
I won’t disclose more about the plot itself except it seems unnecessarily complicated, which is a term I would use to describe most of Black Sunday. It’s almost like the movie wants us to think these convolutions will make it all seem smarter than it really is. I recommend interested viewers take a pass and instead take The Train.
Dir: John Frankenheimer
Starring Robert Shaw, Marthe Keller, Bruce Dern
Watched on Arrow Video blu-ray