Black Sunday (1977) on Netflix
R19772h 23mActionDramaThriller
Michael Lander, who flies a Goodyear blimp, and Dahlia Iyad, a Black September operative, plan to bomb the Super Bowl. Mossad agent David Kabakov and FBI agent Sam Corley hunt them.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb6.8/1010,003 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes76%
Trailer
Plot summary
Michael Lander steers a Goodyear blimp over NFL games, and the crowds he sees each weekend are the people he wants to take with him when he dies. Torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, a court martial and a failed marriage left him with that wish. Dahlia Iyad, a Black September operative who controls him, shares his plan: a bomb packed with plastique and a quarter-million steel flechettes fixed under the blimp's gondola and set off during Super Bowl X over the Orange Bowl in Miami, in front of more than 80,000 spectators and the President of the United States. The attack is meant to draw attention to the Palestinian cause and punish American support for Israel. Mossad agent David Kabakov, with FBI agent Sam Corley and his partner Robert Moshevsky, hunts for the details.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Black Sunday (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Goodyear's Robert Lane granted director John Frankenheimer use of the company's blimps on three conditions: the villainous pilot had to be shown working for a contractor, not Goodyear; the explosion could not emit from the Goodyear name; and the blimp could not be part of any violence.
- Producer Robert Evans secured the NFL's unprecedented cooperation, letting the production shoot footage with its principal actors during the real Super Bowl X on January 18, 1976, as the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Dallas Cowboys 21-17.
- Goodyear let the film use its blimps but barred its "Goodyear Wingfoot" logo from advertising and movie posters, so the words "Super Bowl" appear in its place on the blimp in all advertising.
- While filming panicked crowd scenes for the blimp's descent, Miami Dolphins player Barry Hill fell and hurt himself, needing a splint and a bandage on his right hand.
- Quentin Tarantino said the scene in Kill Bill: Volume 1 where Daryl Hannah, disguised as a nurse, tries to kill The Bride is an homage to a similar sequence in Black Sunday; his split-screen version nods to the Black Sunday trailer, not the film.
- Black Sunday was banned in Germany and Japan; director John Frankenheimer blamed that, along with the earlier terrorism-at-a-football-game film Two-Minute Warning, for hurting the film's audience response.
- The story was inspired by the Munich massacre, the 1972 attack by the Black September organization on Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics, whose name gave the novel and the film its title.
