1977 (FSM Release 2010)

Composed and Conducted by John Williams
Orchestrator: Herbert W. Spencer
Recording Engineer: John Norman
Recorded August 1976 at Paramount
Director: John Frankenheimer

FSM Vol. 12 No. 19
Format: CD
Total Playing Time: 64:12
Date: Jan 29, 2010
Cat. No. SC115
German Title: Schwarzer Sonntag

Track Listing

  1. Beirut (0:37)
  2. Commandos Arrive (1:15)
  3. Commando Raid (5:30)
  4. It Was Good/Dahlia Arrives/The Unloading (3:11)
  5. Speed Boat Chase (1:50)
  6. The Telephone Man/The Captain Returns (2:14)
  7. Nurse Dahlia/Kabakov’s Card/The Hypodermic (3:28)
  8. Moshevsky’s Dead (1:57)
  9. The Test (1:55)
  10. Building the Bomb (1:53)
  11. Miami/Dahlia’s Call (2:26)
  12. The Last Night (1:28)
  13. Preparations (2:42)
  14. Passed (0:31)
  15. The Flight Check (1:49)
  16. Airborne/Bomb Passes Stadium (1:46)
  17. Farley’s Dead (1:33)
  18. The Blimp and the Bomb (3:12)
  19. The Take Off (1:43)
  20. Underway (0:39)
  21. Air Chase (Part 1) (1:12)
  22. Air Chase (Parts 2 and 3)/The Blimp Hits (7:19)
  23. The Explosion (2:36)
  24. End Title (2:15)

ALTERNATES AND SOURCE MUSIC

  1. Hotel Lobby (source) (1:49)
  2. Fight Song #1 (source) (0:51)
  3. Fight Song #2 (source) (1:45)
  4. End Title (alternate, without percussion) (2:20)
  5. The Explosion (revised ending)/End Title (film edit) (2:12)

Black Sunday was a large-scale thriller about an attempted terrorist attack on the Super Bowl, adapted from a novel by Thomas Harris (The Silence of the Lambs), produced by Robert Evans (Chinatown) and directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate). Robert Shaw (Jaws) stars as an Israeli Mossad agent teaming with the FBI; Marthe Keller plays a terrorist who is manipulating an ex-POW pilot (Bruce Dern) into flying a blimp over the crowd at the Super Bowl and exploding rifle darts into the 85,000 spectactors.

Black Sunday is a minor masterpiece of grim 1970s international espionage (decades later, Steven Spielberg and John Williams would revisit the genre in Munich). Much of the film’s success is owed to director Frankenheimer, renowned for his handling of large-scale physical action in films such as The Train, Grand Prix and French Connection II. The film’s climax at the Super Bowl—much of it shot at the actual Super Bowl X—features some of the most spectacular footage ever captured for a Hollywood movie.

John Williams was a natural choice to score Black Sunday. Not only was he a veteran of the 1970s disaster cycle (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno) but his landmark score to Jaws marked him as Hollywood’s top composer at a time when Paramount Pictures was positioning Black Sunday to be the blockbuster of 1977 (a claim to fame shortly taken by Star Wars).

For the Frankenheimer film, Williams composed a taut, suspenseful score with an obsessive terrorist motive and grim but noble minor-mode theme for Shaw’s character. As the film expands in scope from claustophobic backrooms to the sprawl of the Super Bowl, so does the score grow from quiet tension to large-scale action-adventure, climaxing in furious symphonic writing for a showdown aboard the (would be) killer Goodyear blimp.

This premiere release (in any form) of the Black Sunday soundtrack is in complete chronological order, remixed by Mike Matessino from the original 16-track 2” masters recorded on the Paramount Pictures scoring stage for stunning sound quality. Liner notes are by Scott Bettencourt, Mike Matessino, Jeff Eldridge and Alexander Kaplan.

(Film Score Monthly)