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…

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.…