BLACK SUNDAY

(March 1977, U.S.)

Here's something you may have forgotten (or possibly never knew) about BLACK SUNDAY. The original 1975 novel was written by Thomas Harris, the same man who created the character of Hannibal Lecter. It's also the only story he's ever written that DIDN'T involve Hannibal Lecter. It's a story of terrorism that was inspired by the Munich massacre, a Black September attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics.

Michael Lander (played by Bruce Dern) is an American blimp pilot deranged by years of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, a failed marriage, and a bitter military court martial. He longs to commit suicide and take as many people as possible with him. So he conspires with Dahlia Iyad (played by Marthe Keller), an operative from a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September, to launch a massive suicide bombing on American soil. They plan to detonate a flechette-based bomb, housed on the underside of the Goodyear blimp, over the Miami Orange Bowl during the Super Bowl between Pittsburgh and Dallas. American and Israeli intelligence agencies, led by a Mossad agent (played by Robert Shaw) and an FBI agent (played by Fritz Weaver), race to prevent the horrific catastrophe. It's a Hollywood film, of course, so the good guys prevent the disaster, kill the bad guys and all is right with the world. It's a film that still holds up well today because when you watch it, your mind drifts back to September 11, 2001. You wish with all your heart that there might have been a touch of Hollywood storytelling in that event. In that story, our American government would have stopped Al-Qaeda, the Twin Towers and the Pentagon Building wouldn't have been attacked and thousands of lives would have been spared. All I can say about that, is that like it or not, Hollywood movies are not real life.

BLACK SUNDAY has been and remains my all time favorite film thriller.

Favorite line of dialogue:

Michael Lander: "My last Christmas in captivity, they allowed me one letter, from Margret, and in it was a photograph of Margret and the kids standing in front of the house, and the shadow of the person that took the picture was in the foreground, and it was wide and it fell on their legs, and all I could think about was who took the picture? I spent more time looking at the shadow than I did at my own wife or kids. I was just gonna give Margret and the kids somethin' to remember me by. I was just gonna give the guy that took the picture somethin' to remember me by. I was just gonna give this whole son-of-a-bitching country somethin' to remember me by! If they can do it to me, why shouldn't I be able to do it to them???"