Black Sunday -- DVD Paramount Home Video 2003     Reviewed by Tony Buchsbaum	In 1976, all was well. The United States was focused on its bicentennial celebrations, all the local parties thrown in cities across the nation that dovetailed with the national gala thrown in July. Wrapped up in all the joy of that time was a great innocence. While there was certainly crime, while there was racism and rape and murder, by and large these were the kinds of things that tended to happen to someone else. The 1960's civil rights rallies and associated acts of terror seemed part of a long-distant past. Though there was terrorism in the 1970s, it didn't happen in our part of the world. It happened "over there," in the hotbed of world politics, the Middle East, at the point of intersection for three of the world's great religious movements: Judaism, Islam and good old American globalism. The conflict over Israel's right to exist was top-of-mind; only four years earlier, in 1972, Israel's entire Olympic team was murdered in their dormitory at the Munich games. More recently, there were bombings, sure, and it was terrible, horrific, but it was sort of handleable as long as it stayed there. The idea that someone could bring that kind of brutality and violence to America was unthinkable. More than the fact that the United States was the world's greatest superpower -- so who would dare to make such a strike? -- there was the rather comforting notion that when all was said and done, and for all their differences, Americans valued life over everything else. Life mattered more than racism and other forms of bigotry. It mattered more than money. It mattered more than one's faith. It mattered, period. To imagine that people would travel halfway around the world to take the lives of others (and their own) in the name of a political agenda was all but the stuff of fiction. Black Sunday was one of those fictions. The first novel by Thomas Harris, who would later become famous as the author of the monumental thrillers Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, Black Sunday was about a PLO plot to explode a blimp over the Super Bowl, killing the U.S. President and the 80,000 others in attendance. As written, the PLO dares to bring the shattering violence of the Middle East to our own picket-fenced front yards. The novel established Harris as a major talent, a writer adept at crafting an intricate plot with memorable characters and an intense motor. It was a smart, edgy thriller in the classic model: Man plots to kill thousands and must be stopped. Hero steps in, overcomes great obstacles, and stops villain. The book was terrifying not so much because it was about terror, but because it was about fearlessness, the fearlessness of the fanatical. The utter willingness to die. This struck a chord because people began to realize this was something impossible to fight in any conventional way. How can you harm people who are ready to die? How can you stop people whose nihilism immunizes them against any possible threat? The book was a distraction that was actually distracting. This was hard-edged, hot politics, life and death stuff. Its villains weren't the twisted megalomaniacs of the James Bond novels, but characters drawn as real people in our real world, as people we could understand because some of their problems were the same as some of ours. In large part, these people were like us, only they believed their cause was more important than their lives. And rather than make them repellent, this quality made them fascinating. Naturally, Black Sunday was a bestseller. Robert Evans, at the helm of Paramount Pictures, snapped up the book's movie rights. John Frankenheimer, director of the acclaimed and controversial The Manchurian Candidate and the psychological thriller Seconds, signed on to direct. Robert Shaw, fresh from Jaws, was cast as Kabakov, the Israeli agent. Marthe Keller, who had made an impact in the recent Marathon Man, was cast as one of the plot's key architects. And Bruce Dern, only a few years into his film career, was cast as the ex-Vietnam POW/blimp pilot who designed and would execute the plot. The film was released to acclaim in 1977. Frankenheimer was in his element, using his unique talent to create and heighten suspense. He made the film in a documentary style, with jittery camera, complex shots and a distinctive raw grittiness that made the film that much more real. Shaw, who'd been so convincing as the seafaring Quint in Jaws, is completely different here, impressively so, as an Israeli-accented agent, a killer who finds his job distasteful but necessary. Keller's Dahlia is effectively ruthless as the female leader of the fictional PLO stand-in, Black September. She's a user who believes her crimes are justified by her politics. And Dern is creepy, desperate to exact revenge on a nation that he thinks forgot all about him when he needed it most. Twenty-five years later, released on DVD for the first time, Black Sunday is an intricate clockwork of a movie that shows how such a plot might be constructed by deconstructing it. There's the group of radicals energized by the angry idea man, the various elements fusing into a full-blown plan, the myriad details of equipment and timing to be worked out, the built-in paranoia of the team members, their passion to make a political statement and have it be understood. The film benefits from a few pivotal set pieces. In one incredible piece of filmmaking, Robert Shaw launches into a full-out run from high in a football stadium, down endless steps to the turf, then along the sidelines from one end of the field to the other (all filmed during an actual Super Bowl). In a related scene, the Goodyear blimp is outfitted with the explosive device built by Dern's character; for him and for the film, this is the moment of truth, and John Williams's pulse-pounding score perfectly escalates the tension to nail-biting levels. Black Sunday is an amazingly entertaining film -- but watching it in 2003 isn't the same as watching it in 1977. With the passing of time, what was once dark fantasy is now harsh reality. Now we know what happens when a plan like this one succeeds. We know how that feels. We know how many thousands die and what the physical site would look like after the event, so much dust and twisted metal and pockmarked earth. We know very well the psychological devastation that comes of such things. Oddly, the horror of Black September's goal, to kill 80,000 people in a Miami football stadium -- a hook that could easily have been written off as simply a thriller's central plot device -- is intensified many-fold by the stark contrast of what happened on September 11. That day's actual body count pushes the tension associated with the potential of the film's much bigger one. The result is a strange, disturbing double echo, where a film is mirrored by a real-life event, and a real-life event which seems to have been foreseen in a prescient film. It isn't too long ago that the kind of scenario Black Sunday depicts was unthinkable. Unfortunately, we now know better. And this sad fact turns this unforgettable political thriller into a truly terrifying cautionary tale. | December 2003   Tony Buchsbaum is the author of Total Eclipse. At night he works on another novel and a screenplay. Days, he writes advertising copy in Lawrenceville, NJ, where he lives with his wife and sons.	The book was terrifying not so much because it was about terror, but because it was about fearlessness, the fearlessness of the fanatical. The utter willingness to die. This struck a chord because people began to realize this was something impossible to fight in any conventional way. How can you harm people who are ready to die? How can you stop people whose nihilism immunizes them against any possible threat?