Black Sunday
1977 Directed by John Frankenheimer
Synopsis
It could be tomorrow!
An Israeli anti-terrorist agent must stop a disgruntled Vietnam vet cooperating in a plot to commit a terrorist plot at the Super Bowl.
Cast
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A taut thriller that expertly mixes international terrorism with Americana.
Characters are built up adding power to a thrilling ending that is never overblown. This is all punctuated with moments of unexpected violence and a character arc of pure brutality.
The Reverence: Undercover construction workers showing their wares.
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Yes, this is a movie about a blimp attack on the Super Bowl. Clearly, Frankenheimer and the scriptwriters were going for 70s blockbuster appeal. But the film has an (appropriately) odd cast and takes far too long setting everything up. We actually spend most of our time following the bomber/blimp pilot/mentally unstable disgraced Vietnam Vet Bruce Dern in his setup, goaded on by a Palestinian terrorist/handler/live-in girlfriend. The good guy tracking the plot is Robert Shaw, as an Israeli Mossad agent. While Dern is perfectly cast, and Shaw is dependable (and appears to be in a noir at some points), the film has long dead stretches in it. Frankenheimer was a great technical director still, but I suspect he might…
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70's political thriller about a terrorist plot at the Superbowl and the burnt out Israeli officer trying to foil it.
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A decent yarn padded to the gills with filler that detracts from the momentum, and almost an embarrassing amount of Robert Shaw staring at the Superbowl crowds. If you can look past that, there's a nice message to it, how intractable the middle east is, with each side feeding the motivations of the other side.
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Director John Frankenheimer was noted for his exceptional political thrillers of the 1960s, with The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May amongst them. His triumphant 1970s thriller Black Sunday was a return to a political context, here in the form of a chilling tale of the threat posed to an unprepared USA by Palestinian terrorism. Indeed, this film effectively marked the beginning of the American cinema of terrorism, a developmental stage bookended by the recent release of The Sum of All Fears, which featured a similar premise of terrorists targeting a major sporting event. Most films that sought to explore terrorism as a global phenomenon in all its implications are indeed found between the releases of these two movies.…
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intro'd by Robert Evans
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A taut thriller that expertly mixes international terrorism with Americana.
Characters are built up adding power to a thrilling ending that is never overblown. This is all punctuated with moments of unexpected violence and a character arc of pure brutality.
The Reverence: Undercover construction workers showing their wares.
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Very interesting terrorism plot, especially in a post 9/11 society.
Definitely worth seeking out if you're a fan of the 70's action/thriller genre.