Friday's Old Fashioned: Black Sunday (1977)

The money shot in “Black Sunday” might well make you laugh as heartily as it will make you gasp. It is a shot of the gone-rogue Goodyear Blimp, piloted by terrorists and packed with a bomb and steel darts, looming like a floating airship “Jaws” over the upper deck of the late Orange Bowl stadium hosting the Super Bowl. (“Black Sunday’s” score was composed by John Williams, the man who actually scored “Jaws”, and who, of course, scored “Star Wars”, released in the same year as “Black Sunday.” And rest assured, you will detect the “Star Wars” score in the “Black Sunday” score. It’s freaky.) Perhaps I’m out of line. Perhaps it would not have been as funny at the time, five years removed from Black September – the villains of the film – committing their infamous and terrible act of terror at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.

Still, there is something wretchedly humorous in a flying corporate advertisement attacking the most corporate sporting event in the world, one attempting to gobble up the other. If it had been made just a few years later, “Mean” Joe Greene, in the midst of the attacking blimp melee, could have valiantly saved a bottle of Coke (and, in fact, the pilot at the controls of the gone-rogue Goodyear Blimp is heard to say just before the climax, “Could you go in back and get me a Coke?”).

“Black Sunday” was directed by John Frankeinheimer, a man who could really kick it with a decent script (“The Train”, “Ronin”), and the screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman, Kenneth Ross and Ivan Moffat which was based on a novel by Thomas Harris authored in the wake of Munich. The script is detail oriented but swiftly paced, the direction is impressively taut, often employing handheld camerawork without feeling herky-jerky, and overall the film is as thrilling as it is unsettling. Much was made of how last summer’s “Man of Steel” laid waste to a whole city, yet never made it seem civilians were in any real peril. In “Black Sunday”, however, when an armed terrorist grabs a woman as a hostage and then charges headlong into beachfront crowds so as to use bystanders as a shield, you will feel the lump in your throat. This could be happening.

The viewing experience becomes that much more knotty upon realization the film has essentially provided no one for whom you can conveniently root. If anything, Frankenheimer is asking us to identify with Michael Lander, the Goodyear Blimp pilot, who decides to team with Black September for payback after being tortured as a POW in Vietnam only to return home to a court martial and a divorce. Lander is played by Bruce Dern, gleefully unhinged, occasionally, when in aviator sunglasses evoking Dr. Strangelove, and he is both an empathetic victim and a no-account finger-pointer. Everyone else caused him to want to blow up The Super Bowl.

It is Lander's vengeful insecurity that Dahlia (Marthe Keller), the Black September operative desperate to make a group statement by hitting America right where it hurts, plays straight to. She ably manipulates Lander to do her bidding, and they are both willing to go down in flames for their cause. Even when Dahlia is compromised because she insists on recording a tape confessional in advance of the attack, a tape which is discovered by the Americans, she refuses to follow orders and pull out. She is hell bent and hard-headed, not unlike David Kabakov (Robert Shaw), "a man who takes things to their ultimate conclusion", the Mossad agent hot on the Black September trail. Like Dahlia’s bullishness, he too has a fatal flaw, and it is in the film’s opening when he has a shot to take Dahlia out and doesn’t.

Kabakov, I guess, becomes the “hero” because he’s the person with law enforcement tracking those opposed to the law, but Frankenheimer does not go out of his way to draw us to Kabakov’s side. His methods are questionable, brutal even, and he confesses a reluctance to continue the investigation until his partner is requisitely killed, at which point it becomes as much about payback as right and wrong. If anything, the film shows us how perhaps potential terrorist threats can only be squashed (albeit barely) if rules are broken and the heroes are as heedless as the villains.

Dark, I know, but it’s why “Black Sunday”, in keeping with the spirit of its title, is rife with gallows humor. “Cancel the Super Bowl?!” cries Joe Robbie (as himself). “That’s like canceling Christmas!” Indeed. If you think for half-a-second that current NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell would cancel the Super Bowl because of a perceived terrorist threat, you must have missed the film employing real footage of Super Bowl XIII in “Black Sunday”, the Super Bowl in which Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Terry Bradshaw had to leave the game after hurling a touchdown pass with a concussion. Players will get concussed and Super Bowls will be played after blackouts and in wintry mix and during terrorist threats because ad revenue trumps all. Don’t believe me?

Look no further than the hapless Goodyear Blimp pilot whom Lander and Dahlia must murder to ensure Lander can take the controls. Alas, the murdered pilot is discovered in his hotel room, which springs Kabakov into action, when the hotel concierge is tasked with entering the pilot’s room and dropping off a courtesy bottle of J&B scotch.

In other words, a nifty bit of product placement saves the day.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Train (1964)

At the 2003 Oscars, the Oscars hosted just weeks after the U.S. invaded Iraq on account of certain things which they did not actually possess, upon winning Best Actress, the impeccable Nicole Kidman said this: “Why are we here? Because art is important.” Truth. Now if you even chose to dismiss this as the warbling of an over-privileged member of the Hollywood gliterrati, which you should not, the elemental truth of her statement remains. Art is important. And if you still choose not to believe it, I direct you to the 1964’s “The Train.”

The two hour-plus saga opens in the waning days of WWII in an art museum in Paris which is on the verge of being reclaimed by the Allies. The scene is quiet, reflective, the camera lingering on the plethora of classic French artwork. The curator, Mademoiselle Villard (Suzanne Flon), thanks a German colonel, Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield), for tending to the paintings and preventing their harm in the violence of the previous years. Come again? What is this? A Nazi with a heart of a gold? Not so fast! Just as we are about to believe in him as righteously as Villard does, von Waldheim orders all the paintings boxed up and transported by train from Paris to Berlin.

And so, the silence is cut, the soundtrack clatters and clangs as the credits roll and the paintings are taken down, and we find ourselves kicked with a steel-toed boot into the action-adventure brawn of director John Frankenheimer. To what lengths will men and women go in the name of impressionism?

Villard goes to the French Resistance for help who go to the railroad inspector Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster, forgoing the French accent entirely because no one wants to watch a Burt Lancaster movie where Burt Lancaster doesn’t talk like Burt Lancaster). The Allies’ takeover is imminent. If they could simply hold up the train for a few days the paintings would be saved! Labiche says what the Kidman-bashers are thinking: “For some things we take the risk, but I won’t waste lives on paintings.” Not, that is, until his ornery engineer Papa Boule (Michel Simon), who appears to bathe and sleep in grease, who doesn’t actually say “I’m one week away from retirement” but may as well have, steers the train’s engine straight into an air raid in the hopes of purposely damaging it so much that it can’t go. But von Waldheim is wise to the scheme and orders Papa Boule executed.

This is the turning point. Labiche is portrayed very much as a man of action. Not as in a man of extraordinary derring-do, though he most certainly does do plenty of that in several thrillingly staged sequences that take full advantage of the title’s mode of transportation, but as a man defined by the choices he makes. He says “I won’t waste lives on paintings” and then proceeds to waste lives on paintings. He never says “I’m going to waste lives on paintings” but that’s what he does. He puts his own life on the line. And at a particularly delicate, dramatic moment when the movie gives him a chance to explain his actions out loud, he doesn’t. He makes another choice (not to be revealed) and walks away.

“The Train” is, in fact, based on fact, on a 1961 book, “Le front de l’art" authored by art historian Rose Valland. The real life Train never made it out of Paris on account of the Resistance keenly employing the ancient art of red tape. Now, you could make red tape delays interesting. I'd reckon Michael Mann or David Fincher could manage it with their viewfinders closed, but the late John Frankenheimer was a man of action and ACTION (!!!). So “The Train”, with an Oscar nominated script penned by Franklin Coen and Frank Davis, transforms the red tape into derailments and wrecks, requisite explosions and a bit of delightful track-switching subterfuge. Why, it even allows for an interlude of Labiche hiding out in the basement of the red-checkered curtained home of the beguiling French girl (Jeanne Moreau) who says she can’t help him but does anyway.

As visceral and entertaining as it is, however, there is a tough interior beneath the stunt-filled crust. It’s about the art, yes, but as the film progresses the art turns into so much more. It becomes a higher plain of pure that the Nazi just can’t have, try as they might, and it becomes a symbol of the Third Reich’s death rattle. Lancaster is custom-made for the part, so unwillingly willing, but the film’s most interesting performance and perhaps even part belongs to Scofield as the going-mad Nazi commander.

The art is his obsession and he rages away, changing orders, defying logic, desperate to cart it across the German border. He makes a big to-do about them being a financial windfall but his final words own up to the fact that he sees the paintings as his. That is the sort of delusion that can be glimpsed in a fellow countryman of his from ‘round about the same time. His showdown with Lancaster is devastating but so too is the showdown that precedes it – one with a nameless German officer who ignores his order to help with the cause of French art and instead tends to shepherding his own men. Von Waldheim screams at him, pulls a pistol, threatens to shoot him dead. The officer barely even registers the firearm. Shoot me, don’t shoot me, whatever, he seems to be saying, but if you’re going to, then just do it and spare me any more of this.

Why you can almost see the entirety of the waning days of the Nazi regime in that exchange.