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Black Sunday

Black Sunday

Movie · 1977 · 13 people

Adapted from Thomas Harris's novel, published two years earlier under the same title, Black Sunday is an action thriller that John Frankenheimer made in America in 1977. An armed group's plan to destroy an American football stadium drives the plot. Produced by Robert Evans for Paramount Pictures, it runs 143 minutes and draws on thriller, mystery, neo-noir and disaster-film conventions; it was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best film in 1978 and placed in the top 25 of GQ's list of the hundred best action films.

The premise is the same as the novel's. The story takes its inspiration from the attack by the Palestinian group Black September on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which also gave the novel and film their title. Robert Shaw, Bruce Dern and Marthe Keller star, with Fritz Weaver, Bekim Fehmiu, Michael V. Gazzo, William Daniels and Clyde Kusatsu also in the cast.

The screenplay is by Ernest Lehman, Kenneth Ross and Ivan Moffat. Ross had earlier written The Day of the Jackal, a similarly plot-driven political thriller.

DirectorJohn Frankenheimer
Production companyParamount Pictures Corporation

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Cast

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Marthe Keller Marthe Keller Actor · 81 years old Clyde Kusatsu Clyde Kusatsu Actor · 78 years old Robert Shaw Bruce Dern Fritz Weaver Bekim Fehmiu Michael V. Gazzo William Daniels Walter Gotell Steven Keats Walter Brooke Robert Ito Terry Bradshaw

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Through different eyes

Action & Thriller Fan Puts pace, tension and set pieces first; little patience for slow drama.

A plot to hit a football stadium is an almost perfect setup for a thriller. Frankenheimer keeps the story tight, and its top-25 spot on GQ's best action films list is no accident. But it really is long: for anyone used to today's pace, some stretches dawdle. If you've got the patience, the build-up of tension pays off.

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

Black Sunday is a typical product of the plot-driven political thriller tradition of the 1970s; that co-writer Kenneth Ross had previously scripted The Day of the Jackal makes the lineage obvious. The screenplay, with Ernest Lehman and Ivan Moffat also on board, tries to hold together the codes of the thriller, the mystery, neo-noir and the disaster film. That layering gives the film weight but sometimes makes it diffuse, as the scale of the disaster movie and the dark tone of neo-noir don't always move to the same rhythm. In my view its greatest strength is that it never loses the simple but effective premise taken from Thomas Harris's novel amid the mix of genres. Its Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination also shows it was seen as a serious example of the form.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

The film takes its inspiration, and its title, from the attack by the group Black September on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Black Sunday can therefore be read as a period document of how the fear of terrorism took hold of Western public opinion in the 1970s, and of how crowded sporting events came to be seen as targets. Pouring a real tragedy into the moulds of an entertainment thriller is a delicate choice from today's vantage point, and viewers should keep that distance in mind. Even so, the film offers an interesting window for anyone who wants to understand the security anxieties of those years and the fragility of mass society.

These are not reader reviews: they are short editorial takes written from different viewer perspectives with AI assistance. Reader reviews are below.

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