But before sunup that morning, a group of armed Palestinian guerrillas from the Black September Movement jumped a fence and moved through the Olympic Village to the quarters of the Israeli squad. They killed two men who tried to resist and took nine other athletes and coaches hostage for 21 hours.

"One Day in September" is Kevin Macdonald's shatteringly intelligent documentary about how a cruel, quixotic plan to trade the Israelis for some imprisoned Palestinians exploded into surreal Grand Guignol. The standoff climaxed in a bloody firefight at a military airport and the massacre of the hostages.

This brave, incendiary movie, which will be shown Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern/Pacific on HBO, beat out "Buena Vista Social Club" for best documentary Academy Award last spring. Despite that, its HBO screening is the first opportunity for most people to see it. Last spring co-producer Arthur Cohn told the Los Angeles Times he thought the Oscar win would help him snag a distribution deal; but the New York Times recently reported that he had sold his movie to HBO for $1 million before the win.

"One Day in September" is really the story of how shallow the security forces were for the 1972 Olympics, and how confused and inadequate their response was to the onslaught of eight men with machine guns. That basic fact has been known for 28 years. But as Jeremy Irons' Claus von Bulow might have drawled, "You have no idea." "One Day in September" has the queasy comedy as well as the horror of a pratfall nightmare. You can't help thinking "Keystone Kops" every time you see the pathetic West German polizei.

Near the start, we learn that Olympic security guards were dressed like -- and were equipped like -- ushers at an Up With People concert. They patrolled the Olympic Village unarmed. In an irony that Stanley Kubrick might have found too cruel, Germans frantic to erase a Third Reich-inspired image of cold and brutal efficiency left their Olympic guests open to attack, and were helpless to deal with the attack after it happened.

One of the movie's many shocking revelations is that a police unit disguised as a flight crew abandoned the idea of ambushing the terrorists at the airport because they didn't feel properly trained and considered it a suicide mission. They retreated too late for the anti-terrorist strategists to compensate with a new plan.

German police had secured neither road routes nor radio communications, not even with the few snipers they had managed to deploy. The snipers were expecting five guerrillas, while international TV-watchers quickly learned there were eight.

The appalling mayhem at the airport defines the point where incompetence becomes immoral. Officials yearning to erase their country's history of genocide found themselves with Jewish blood on their hands.

"One Day in September" portrays human life sacrificed to public relations -- all under the banner of Olympian peace, love and understanding.

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