I was just starting my senior year in College, when the 1972 Munich Olympics were disrupted by a terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team, resulting eventually in nine Israeli deaths. In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, Israelis don't need any new evidence that terrorist murder is a prime weapon in the anti-Israeli arsenal. Nor should we, but perhaps it is good that we be reminded on the decades-long history of anti-Israeli terror.
September 5 is a film that chronicles the actual historic Munich massacre from the perspective of the ABC Sports crew that happened to be there, covering the Olympics. It stars Peter Sarsgard as Roone Arledge (ABC Sports President), John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason, (head of the control room in Munich), and Leonie Benesch as Marianne Gebhardt (a German staffer, the only one in the room who understood German). There is also some archival footage from the actual event, including Jim McKay and Peter Jennings.
The film fully captures the tragedy of the event, even while its focus is primarily not in the Olympic Village but in the ABC Sports broadcasting facility. It takes us back to a seemingly long lost world of rotary phones and highlights the inherent tensions of covering such an event live in real time, including on-the-spot quick decisions and errors. It also illustrates the impact of commercial rivalry with other news networks and even with other divisions within the same network.
The film stays focused on the crew and what they go through. We get glimpses of the larger picture - of, for example, the tensions about continuing the Olympics while all this was going on, and of the historical anxieties felt in a special way by the German hosts of the Olympics. But, despite being set in such a seemingly different media world (now more than half a century ago), the film's contemporary resonance remains relevant and vivid.
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