THE HORSEMEN (1971) ***1/2 (out of four) Image B+ Sound B-

Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada or Compare Prices The Horsemen opens in much the same way that Black Sunday closes: with an attenuated set-piece that begins to tire like a concussion. As Uraz (Omar Sharif) plays a life or death game of Buzkashi (literal translation: "goat grabbing"), an Afghani pastime in which various chapandaz (riders) make a grab for a headless carcass the winner deposits in the centre of a scoring area, John Frankenheimer finds a way to give the chaos cohesion, natch (he was typecast as an action director for a reason), but the repetitiousness required only trumps up the barbarism we perceive in the sport. It's mildly xenophobic and altogether fatiguing, then, and the movie only takes off when Uraz dismounts his horse. Forced to abandon the Buzkashi tournament because of a wounded leg, Uraz manufactures his own danger by taking the treacherous route back home and leading his servant, Mukhi (David de Keyser), into temptation, first by bequeathing him Jahil, his prized stallion, then by allowing "untouchable" Zareh (Leigh Taylor-Young, who is mind-bendingly gorgeous) to tag along, knowing full well she will attempt to wile Mukhi into betraying his master. The film is seemingly about machismo (it'd be misleading to characterize Uraz's gestures as suicidal), but by the time Uraz reaches the house of his father, Tursen (Jack Palance, bearing a passing physical resemblance to Sharif), the proverbial finest chapandaz who ever lived, we realize it's more specifically about the psychic toll of legacy. (It might allude to Frankenheimer's beloved Kennedy clan in that sense.) In the most riveting passage of The Horsemen's engrossing second half, Tursen pierces his son's armour with a cruelly logical hypothesis of what went down between Uraz and his travelling companions, and we realize that what Uraz seeks through his childish impetuousness is Tursen's worldliness. Such renders the abrasive Uraz instantly sympathetic (and archetypal) and justifies the film's existence within a cinematic period that was more accommodating of character studies than sweeping epics; The Horsemen takes its rightful place, if gawkily so, among not only post-Easy Rider fare about disenfranchised youth, but also Frankenheimer's best films, with their provocative philosophical debates and canny transformation motifs. The sensitive be warned, though: there are intense scenes of (simulated?) animal cruelty. Columbia Tri-Star's DVD release of The Horsemen presents the theatrical version in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen--had Frankenheimer, a late-life advocate of the format, not passed away in 2002, it's conceivable he may have pressed for a restoration of the film to its roadshow length, at which to the best of my knowledge it's never been publicly screened. The source print is dirty in places but the image is fresh-looking and the cinnamon skin tones at least imply fidelity. Not as satisfying is the 2.0 Dolby Digital mono mix, which sounds occasionally muffled and always a tad harsh. Trailers for The Horsemen, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Guns of Navarone round out a disc that boasts awful redone cover art--the film's original one-sheet was striking!-Bill Chambers Running Time 109 minutes Aspect Ratio(s) 2.35:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced; Languages English Mono; CC Yes; Subtitles English, French; DVD-9; Region One; Columbia Tri-Star

Before Thomas Harris created a genius shrink-turned-serial murderer, he wrote the everything-old-is-new-again terrorist saga Black Sunday, managing to incorporate the Super Bowl into its tale of good intelligence saving the day. How novel. What's constant between this and Harris' Hannibal Lecter trilogy is his interest in broken heroes: the inversion of the man of action archetype that germinated in the fifties Western tradition and flowered in the voodoo ego-nomics of the Reagan-mad eighties, locating Black Sunday firmly in the deep well of seventies cinema--filthy with ineffectual champions and astringent endings. But where Harris' novel understood its place in the bittersweet, paranoid zeitgeist, Black Sunday, with its all-star cast (Robert Shaw two years after Jaws, Bruce Dern at his peak, Marthe Keller a year removed from Marathon Man), megalomaniacal producer Robert Evans, and blockbuster aspirations, proves to be another Star Wars-style harbinger of the impending end of what was possibly the most amazing period in film in history.

By 1977, John Frankenheimer was in desperate need of a hit. I don't know that he was ever the same since the assassination of close friend Bobby Kennedy in 1968, and while it's true that one of the touchstone atrocities of the sixties ruined Frankenheimer (even as it nourished the furious cinema of the seventies), it's also true that the main difference between the director of some of the seminal films of the sixties (The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds, The Train, Seven Days in May) and some of the worst films of all time since (Prophecy, French Connection II, The Holcroft Covenant) is courage. Watergate, Vietnam, Kent State, Watts... What inspired some artists to rage against the machine caused Frankenheimer to retreat, his late-years prickliness the kind of knee-jerk defensiveness of a man who knew the shape of his cosmic flinch. Black Sunday, despite its technical proficiency, tight script, and sharp performances, is finally just a movie about how a lone hero can save the world from a gang of highly organized, highly dedicated terrorists. It's a fantasy--if an expert one with a rosy conclusion undermining the core disquiet at work in the rest of the film. It's something like finding Bobby Ewing in the shower--and that equivocation is, at the end of discussion, the thing that's the most prescient about an already shockingly prescient film.

Maj. David Kabakov (Shaw) is a weary Israeli agent on the trail of Palestinian terrorists, wiping out a cell of them but sparing lovely flower Dahlia (Keller) as he surprises her in the shower. He's not ruthless enough it seems, his years of murder leading to nothing more than what he describes in one of the film's sharpest speeches as an endless parade of the same atrocities carried off by the same offenders. And his act of fatigued mercy frees Dahlia to seduce disturbed Vietnam vet Michael Lander (Dern), enlisting him in a plot to explode the Goodyear Blimp during and above the Super Bowl.

Though much is justifiably being made of the implausible film's sudden plausibility post-9/11, there's still a considerable gap between a jetliner and a blimp on the threat-meter--a fear chasm addressed in the film by a ratcheting of the histrionics to a ridiculous pitch. What begins as a dark, uncompromising, character-driven thriller ends in a full hour of Dern acting like a maniac, Shaw bearing down, and Keller getting tearful and pulling hair. Not helping matters is that the climactic blimp chase goes on for a stultifying length with practically zero tension, betraying laughable bluescreen effects that are tempting to blame on age, but had already been done with more skill and enduring effect for decades (see: North by Northwest). Its conclusion beyond ridiculous with its cheery epilogue of Shaw-on-a-rope the stuff of camp legend, Black Sunday is, in a self-contained microcosm, the decline of mainstream film from the Coppola of The Conversation to the Coppola of Jack--a shrinking away from dialogues that matter in favour of pomp and hollow circumstance.

For as flawed as Black Sunday's third act turns out to be, the film clearly deserves some sort of special feature support from its studio, particularly in light of its sudden topicality. Alas, the studio in question is Paramount, who never met a title they couldn't dump unceremoniously on the format. Black Sunday finds itself in an excellent 2.35:1 anamorphic video transfer that preserves the particular filmic quality of a seventies production, distracting often enough from the fact that the black levels are spot on and that there's a minimum of grain and edge enhancement. A rich DD 5.1 remix makes good use of channel separation, though the final conflagration sounds suspiciously like a stretched mono track: it's imperfectly distributed and a little tinny besides. Bonus material? Surely you jest.-Walter Chaw

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