Say, did you hear that the Super Bowl is this weekend? On Sunday evening, over 100 million Americans and millions more worldwide will settle in to watch the game (and, in many cases, the movie ads that punctuate it). The NFL’s annual championship contest didn’t really take off as a major cultural event, however, until the mid-1970s, the same era that the Hollywood box office was dominated by the disaster film genre. It’s no surprise, then, that Paramount Pictures and mega-producer Robert Evans (The Godfather, Chinatown) predicted plenty of green when they decided to combine the two with their 1977 “terrorists pilot a blimp into the Super Bowl” thriller Black Sunday.
Directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) and based on a novel by “The Silence of the Lambs” author Thomas Harris, Black Sunday stars Robert Shaw as David Kabakov, a veteran operative of Israel’s Mossad anti-terrorism division. During a raid on a Beirut safehouse for the Palestinian militant group Black September, David encounters a young woman taking a shower and, feeling her fear, decides to spare her life. That’s a decision that will come back to haunt him, because the woman is ruthless Black September mastermind Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller). Dahlia has devised a scheme to strike at the U.S. for its support of Israeli Middle East policies where it will really hurt: on Super Bowl Sunday. The key to her success is Michael Lander (Bruce Dern), a traumatized ex-Vietnam POW who was court-martialed upon his return home. Now an airship pilot at NFL games, Michael harbors deep resentment against America and is an easy target for Dahlia to seduce and draw into her plans.
David and his partner Robert Moshevsky (Steven Keats) work with FBI agent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) to uncover the details of where and how Dahlia’s attack will occur. Meanwhile, she and Michael set out to hijack one of the airships and arm it with an explosive device that will send thousands of steel flechettes (They resemble large darts; I had to look it up, too.) like shrapnel into a packed stadium of fans. Director Frankenheimer, whose action/suspense résumé at the time included Seven Days in May, The Train, and Seconds, deftly alternates between the terrorists’ preparations and the agents’ race to learn their target and find them before it’s too late.
The movie’s climax comes at the Miami Orange Bowl during Super Bowl X between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Dallas Cowboys (In case you’re wondering, in real life Pittsburgh won 21-17). David and Sam are following the dart-filled blimp in a helicopter. As a packed house that includes the U.S. president watches, David gets lowered by a winch onto the airship as it crashes into the stadium’s upper stands and now must attach the winch to the colossal flying bomb so it can towed out over the Atlantic before it detonates (in a move that sounds suspiciously like the climax of The Dark Knight Rises. Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!).
Black Sunday was not the first feature film to have an exciting conclusion at the Super Bowl. That honor goes–believe it or not–to 1976’s live-action Disney comedy Gus, about a field goal-kicking mule. That’s right, operator–a field goal-kicking mule. It’s not even the first thriller set at a pro football title game. As often happens in Hollywood, hitting theatres five months before Frankenheimer’s effort was Universal’s Two-Minute Warning, with Charlton Heston as a police captain tracking down a sniper who’s targeted the fans at a generic “Championship X” contest at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum between Baltimore and L.A. (Fun Fact: Neither Two-Minute Warning nor Black Sunday was a box office hit, with each failing to crack their year’s top 40 films. More successful than either of the two was–you guessed it–Disney’s Gus.)
What this film had in its favor was the pull of Paramount and producer Evans, who convinced the NFL to let them shoot at Super Bowl X in Miami and use the game and team logos. Thanks to Frankenheimer’s work with Goodyear on the 1966 racing drama Grand Prix, they were also able to get the tire company to agree to the use of their blimps…under certain conditions (No Goodyear logo on the publicity material, make it clear that Dern’s villain was not a Goodyear employee, and so on). The climactic scenes of the airship crashing into the stadium had to be staged several days after the actual game, with Miami Dolphins players among the performers dressed as Steelers and Cowboys, and thousands of extras supplied by the United Way (in exchange for Frankenheimer directing a promotional short for the charity).
While its marketing suggested it was the latest in the wave of ’70s disaster epics, Black Sunday fits more into the suspense thriller category for most of its running time. Harris’ novel was inspired by the 1972 Munich Olympics terror attacks (committed, incidentally, by Black September). The film’s screenplay, co-written by North by Northwest author Ernest Lehman, keeps this as well as other contemporary references intact in a plot that sadly feels just as timely today. Frankenheimer’s expert pacing keeps things moving at a brisk clip. And the performances by leads Shaw (one of his last before his untimely 1978 death at 51), Dern (who would play another troubled Vietnam vet in the following year’s Coming Home), and Keller as people driven by their respective causes will at times make you wonder whose side you’re rooting for. The final scenes suffer a bit from the practical effects of the time, but shouldn’t take you too far out of the action. If you’re not ready for seven or eight hours of pre-game programming this weekend, give Black Sunday a watch.
Oh, and maybe it’s me, but the footage of the blimp mock-up’s distended front descending into the stands always reminded me of the giant breast roaming the countryside in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* *But Were Afraid to Ask. Yeah, it’s definitely me.