Black Sunday *** (1977, Robert Shaw, Bruce Dern, Marthe Keller, Bekim Fehmiu, Fritz Weaver) – Classic Movie Review 7323

Director John Frankenheimer’s moderately enjoyable, though sometimes even nail-biting 1977 thriller Black Sunday is based on the novel by Thomas Harris about crazed Black September Arab terrorists (played by Marthe Keller, Bekim Fehmiu and Bruce Dern) threatening to blow up the Miami Super Bowl stadium while the US President is at a football game, along with 80,000 other spectators.

The highlight of the well set-up movie is the thrilling if conventional action excitement between police helicopters and the stolen Goodyear balloon the terrorists plan to blow up while it is hovering over the stadium. Keller, Fehmiu, Dern, Robert Shaw (as Israeli major Kabakov) and Fritz Weaver (as sympathetic FBI agent Corley) all go energetically and entertainingly through their typecast acting motions.

Frankenheimer’s movie is entertaining as acceptable hokum, but you would have thought that the great screen-writer Ernest Lehman (with Kenneth Ross and Ivan Moffat) could have sorted out a more convincing and cohesive screenplay, which rambles quite a way into overtime (it runs to 143 minutes) and cannot avoid clichés.

Black Sunday is perhaps of most interest now as a work of novelist Thomas Harris, author of Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Hannibal Rising. The book of Black Sunday is classier than the movie.

Also in the cast are Steven Keats, Walter Gotell, William Daniels, Michael V Gazzo, Victor Campos, Walter Brooke, James Jeter, Clyde Kusatsu, Tom McFadden and Robert Patten.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7323

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com