Before he unleashed Hannibal Lecter, Thomas Harris floated a bomb into the Super Bowl
Film Lists Thomas Harris
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With a new Tom Clancy movie, Without Remorse, premiering on Amazon Prime, we’re looking back on other Hollywood adaptations of mass paperback novels, a.k.a. so-called airport fiction.
Black Sunday (1977)
John Frankenheimer’s mid-career political thriller Black Sunday opens with a familiar scene. A woman gets out of a cab in a crowded Middle Eastern marketplace, her sunglasses and scarf marking her as someone who doesn’t want to be seen. She pushes through dense crowds in narrow passageways, past booths selling spices, copper teapots, and other items meant to serve as symbols of exotic otherness to American audiences. Once she reaches the other side, she hails another cab, and continues on to her final destination. It’s missing the yellow filter, but other than that, the sequence could be taken from any number of 21st-century spy movies.
When it was released in 1977, Black Sunday stood on the precipice of two cinematic trends: the disaster movie, which had peaked with the release of The Towering Inferno in 1974, and the terrorism thriller. The latter genre was still coalescing at the time, and Black Sunday sits midway between the apolitical lone wolves of the early ’70s and the Russian and Arabic stereotypes who stoked xenophobic fears throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond. Inspired by the attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, author Thomas Harris’ source novel combines a real sporting event (the Super Bowl) and a real militant group (Palestinian radicals Black September) for a fictional plot to weaponize the Goodyear Blimp. It’s concocted by two outsiders: traumatized Vietnam vet Lander (Bruce Dern) and German-Palestinian guerilla fighter Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller). For Frankenheimer’s part, he insisted that this was not a political movie, saying, “It’s no more a film about the Mideast crisis than it’s a film about football.”
Dern’s performance is a highlight, supplying a damaged human dimension to what otherwise plays like a procedural—albeit one that spends significant time with players on both sides of the law. You can tell that Black Sunday was based on a page-turner, as the story jumps between continents, characters, and plot points to examine the preparations and negotiations undergone not only by Lander and Iyad but also the lawmen chasing them. There’s a moral ambiguity to Black Sunday’s depiction of terrorism that’s very pre-9/11; this film can easily be read as a case study in how American foreign policy pushes people to hate, and how blind loyalty to a cause can obscure the humanity of all involved. Midway through the film, Mossad agent Kabakov (Robert Shaw) tells a colleague, “You’ve come to see both sides of the question. That’s never good.” But Black Sunday forces the audience to see both sides.
The extended buildup of this 143-minute film gives added resonance to its expertly crafted finale, a tense sequence filmed at the actual Super Bowl X in Miami that culminates in a panicked melee reminiscent of celebrated disaster films like 1970’s Airport. Frankenheimer’s staging and editing in this sequence are designed for maximum nail-biting efficiency. Take the shot of Shaw looking out over a crowd of 80,000 people, scanning it for danger. The camera pans up to the Goodyear Blimp, which, unknown to the oblivious agent, has been outfitted with hundreds of kilos of plastic explosives and metal darts designed to kill as many people as possible. The special effects have not aged well, but the suspense of that last half hour is as potent as ever.
Despite its impressive scope and Hollywood pedigree—the film was produced by the legendary Robert Evans, who called it “a disappointing success”—Black Sunday made only modest box-office. Its bravura finale lives on, however, in two more pieces of political pulp, Tom Clancy’s The Sum Of All Fears and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, both of which took direct inspiration from Black Sunday. But perhaps the film’s most impactful, if subtle, legacy is this: The sale of the film rights to Black Sunday allowed Harris to quit his day job as a journalist to write fiction full time. His next novel? Red Dragon in 1981, the book that introduced the world to Hannibal Lecter.
Availability: Black Sunday is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, and is available to rent or purchase digitally from Google Play, Apple, YouTube, and VUDU.
61 Comments
ARCHER: God, who would want to put a bomb on that?CAPTAIN LAMMERS: Well, that’s what we’re hoping ISIS can find out.ARCHER: No, why bother? Some broad gets on there with a staticky sweater and, boom, it’s “oh, the humanity!”LAMMERS: No, no, that’s—MALORY: Sterling.LANA: Were you watching some other blimp commercial just now?LAMMERS: Technically, it’s a rigid airship.MALORY: Filled with helium.LANA: Which is nonflammable. Dumbass.
As someone who has more or less enjoyed every season of Archer, I still think the show peaked with Skytanic.
“CAPTAIN LAMMERS: Well, that’s what we’re hoping ISIS can find out.”
God, so many lines from the early seasons read differently now.
ARCHER: God, who would want to put a bomb on that?CAPTAIN LAMMERS: Well, that’s what we’re hoping ISIS can find out.Awkwaaaaaard…
One thing I think doesn’t get mentioned enough about the Super Bowl is how much it used to suck. It seems to me like the last 25 Super Bowls have been way more exciting than the first 30.
I think we can all agree that it peaked in 1985…
Steve Fuller definitely peaked in that video.
As a non-football fan, this is literally the only Superbowl I can name both teams from.
Oh no you don’t! 1989 rules them all!
Considering how lame and boring the Super Bowl is now, it’s a wonder anyone bothered to watch it back then.
“Now”? Sure, this year’s Super Bowl was pretty forgettable, but I thought last year’s was great.
Back then (the 70s), there were 3 channels and PBS. And, as I recall, the competition for the Superbowl would have been a second tier Disney movie, McMillan and Wife, and Upstairs, Downstairs or a nature documentary on PBS.Also, no internet. Damn right people watched the Super Bowl. What else were they going to do? Talk to their family?
Scheduling your terrorist attack is like scheduling your multimillion dollar ad.Do you risk a time slot in the forth quarter, or will the audience be gone by then.
There was no point in even watching it for years and years. I don’t know why it suddenly became – more often than not – like a college bowl game.
Jane: Goodyear?Frank: No, the worst.
Came for this. Am happy. The Naked Gun is such an excellent movie.
It’s streaming on ? How does a subscription to cost each month?
You got Kinjaed!
Weaponize an aircraft? HA! Boy they had some imagination back in the 1970’s!
In an article the Wright brothers wrote, prior to WWI, they proposed that aircraft be prohibited from flying over cities; their concern at the time was that airplane engines were unreliable, but it seems like good advice.
I read a book about POW’s in WWI and many were pilots who weren’t even shot down by enemy fire; their planes just konked out on the wrong side of the lines.
My great uncle downed a large number of German aircraft. He was a really bad mechanic for the Luftwaffe.
Tom Clancy did predict using an airliner as a weapon in Debt of Honor.
Also Kurt Russell predicted it in Executive Decision.
12 years after Stephen King did it in The Running Man.
Hey, didya know that the mining compound dynamite had military applications?Apparently, Alfred Nobel didn’t….
No mention of the classic 70’s era John Williams soundtrack when he was at the top of his game. Great, suspenseful score from the master.
Bruce Dern — subtlety in everything he does.
We need a top 20 ranking of all of Dern’s nutzo performances. I can’t lie though, he’s better than he has to be in this.
This is a great thriller. Thomas Harris, John Frankenheimer, Bruce Dern and Robert Shaw – what a great lineup of talent. I especially love the scene where Bruce Dern convinces the owner of the barn where he’s testing the weapon that it’s a camera. The owner volunteers to be in the picture and Dern lets him get annihilated. The dead owner doesn’t even register on Dern because all he can see is the beautiful spatter pattern that awaits everyone at the Super Bowl.
If only his daughter had one of those in Jurassic Park! The dinos wouldn’t stand a chance!
If only Robert Shaw had it onboard the Orca.
If only Robert Shaw had killed the terrorist mastermind in the beginning of the movie, I seem to recall.
That was a great scene, which is what made the climax so disappointing.
The most chilling was the “photograph” scene. Watching Dern walk back into the hanger, ignore the guy he’d left, and look at the wall of the hanger to see the result.
Harris grew up just north of my hometown. One year he actually attended my high school while his parents were getting a divorce or some such. My high school computer teacher was the new music teacher at the time. I don’t even know if Harris spent the full academic year there, but that didn’t stop my teacher from name dropping him left and right after Silence of the Lambs was such a huge hit. There was a movie poster hanging on his office door that he claimed Harris sent him. Since there was no signature, I just assumed that one of his previous students gave it to him before it was thrown out from the theater or video rental place.
It may be strange, but this film has become something of a Super Bowl Sunday ritual for me. Terrific thriller. Given the kind of film it is, Oscars may have been out of the question, but watch the scene where Bruce Dern breaks down after having to tell Marthe Keller that he was replaced as pilot and tell me he wasn’t robbed of a nomination.
Somewhat off-topic, but going into how older material can inspire story-telling for decades to come: The release of all that 1920’s material due to the copyrights finally being allowed to expire… that may give us some interesting film-making for some time.
I don’t remember any terrorism movies with Russian stereotypes. Which could just reflect gaps in my cinematic knowledge.The section in the book about Lander’s backstory came across as somewhat personal for Harris, as a fellow southerner. Lander also gets a messed up scene involving a garbage disposal that was unsurprisingly left out of the film.
Just substitute drones for the blimp, and it’s still a scary scenario.
Film does illustrate Frankenheimer’s mastery over machines and suspense (The Train, Grand Prix, Ronan). It is a shame they cut his budget at the final destruction of the blimp though. That would have elevated the film’s semi classic status. Also a poorly executed scene where a silencer is placed on a revolver where it would do no good. Otherwise a fantastic, well acted and well plotted film.
The special effects have not aged well
No, even for 1977 the special effects sucked.
I saw this after seeing the original Star Wars and finally catching up on the original STAR TREK, and the mismatched lighting of the blatantly obvious process shots made almost every “suspense” scene laughable.
They could have (and in Ronin two decades later, Frankenheimer did) shot as much using the actual props and locations as possible, limiting the effects work to the handful of shots that couldn’t be realistically staged without risking life and limb. What they did instead showed why “the kids with the beards” wanted as little as possible to do with “Old Hollywood”.
Ronin was awesome. Still watch that occasionally.
Great, smart action film — one of the first Robert DeNiro performances I actually liked.
i remember reading this book & feeling gut punched by the ending (which is a bit different from the movie).
They honestly don’t make movie trailers like this anymore. Yeah, it does kinda go too in depth to the story and plot, but still leaves enough to the imagination to make you want to watch it. And split screen really needs to come back, at least for trailers.
No matter how many people you have to machine gun down for that, hijacking a blimp should be its own reward.
“Midway through the film, Mossad agent Kabakov (Robert Shaw) tells a colleague, “You’ve come to see both sides of the question. That’s never good.””Actually it’s the colleague who says this to Kabakov. Then when the colleague is murdered afterwards, he goes back to seeing one side.
At 9 years old I snuck into the last 1/2 hour of this R-rated movie after my umpteenth viewing of STAR WARS. Needless to say it was quite an eye-opener.
That was no easy feat back in the day ushers actually gave a shit about that sort of thing
Oh definitely…a year later my friends and I tried to sneak into ANIMAL HOUSE and got bagged & tossed out after the first ten minutes. Worth a shot.
I was going to mention that I watched this one Saturday afternoon on local television man years ago, but it turns out that I watched ‘Two Minute Warning’ with Charlton Heston.
They made sure to get that shit festival to the screen a few months before Black Sunday was released.
Hijacking a blimp?
Seems weird that Goodyear would have been okay with the use of their brand for this.
I remember the print ads for this movie showing the blimp over the stadium with the tagline, “It could be tomorrow!” and thinking wait a second, that only works if you’re looking at the ad on a Saturday.
I think this film had my first viewing of Movie-boob. The rest was, uh, not as memorable (I was 15 at the time). I’ll put it on my list and try again.