66 “Marathon Man” (1976) Bravo’s “100 Scariest Movie Moments” part II, minute marker 15:50 This is based on a novel by the great William Golding, and he, at least in the credits, wrote the screenplay, but he’d the first to admit that the director revised and gutted his text at whim. Almost always, I side with the writer on these concerns, but here I must side with the director. Very much a product of its time, the novel “Marathon Man” combined then recent real-world revelations of secretive evils by the American government, specifically project Paperclip, where Nazi war criminals were protected by and employed, by the US government; there were also congressional inquires of CIA extra-judicial killings; and the deepening awareness of recent misconduct of Joe McCarthy/HUAC. Suddenly, nothing was as it seemed, giving thriller writers had a lot more to work with, but the revelations seemed without context. The challenge for the thriller writer was the balance, having your characters lost in a wilderness of mirrors, and then telling a coherent tale. The writers only template was James Bond, so the real-world revelations were communicated to the public with Bond-ish cartoonism. In this novel, which is far more coherent than the film, we see not only the protagonist, Thomas Babington Babe Levy, but the author, responding to the familiar world becoming unfamiliar with amusement-park paranoias in the way Goldman cast his spies as existing in a parallel universe where the regular rules, not only of law and morality, but functionality and careerism, simply don’t apply. The spy in this case, Babe’s brother “Doc,” finds himself isolated from any identifiable civilization. His longings are identifiable enough, but not so for how he lived and who he interacted with. In its day, you could find the same thing in novel after novel, and critics often took it deadly seriously, because this was after the revelations but before the legal battles involving, and memoirs of, people had actually lived the life and showed us some insight of how such a world, for the participants, actually felt mundane. Yes, the novel was more comprehensible than the film, but far from believable. Director John Schlesinger wisely focused on the easiest to communicate elements, and the wonderful Hitchcockian disorientation of the innocent (that would be Babe, see the names symbolic) dragged into events beyond his comprehension, and deliberately leaving much unexplained, just having his hero run for his life. Babe is played by Dustin Hoffman and Doc is Roy Schieder. Despite the profound differences between the insecure academic (former) and the super-spy (latter), but both brothers are haunted by the suicide of their father who hounded to suicide by an ambiguous McCarthiest purge. This plays not direct role in the plot, but defines both men. In the case of Doc, it defines him by contradiction, because by some equally ambiguous route, this secular Jew lands out protecting Nazi war criminals. For reasons never made clear, he’s run afoul of his employers, or his clients, or both, and is marked for death. Hoffman an innocent, bookish, sheltered, has no idea about any of this. And then there’s Laurence Oliver, the aging Nazi, Szell, who is trying to retrieve a fortune in jewels, and that pursuit shapes all the comprehensible action in the plot. This will lead to about a half a dozen deaths, and Babe being dragged into the middle of it all. As the film is mostly about Babe, so it’s okay that we mostly don’t know what’s going on, because neither does he. When cast in this film, Oliver was in semi-retirement, his body wracked with numerous ailments. His frailty is obvious, but does not diminish from his menace. In a way it contributes to the story, because it makes physical the psychic vulnerabilities that define this over powering villain. This is a world divided between those who believe they can control everything, and those who understand life is about muddling through. Szell is the former, and now old, is increasingly terrified by the uncontrollable world, more so than the more obviously vulnerable Babe. What sets the plot in motion is the death of the Nazi’s brother in a car accident. What Szell is unable to accept is that it really an accident, as demonstrated by his obsessively repeated question, “Is it safe?” He really doesn’t know what’s going on much better than Hoffman, and his paranoia is of the most murderous, self destructive, kind. Szell demonstrates is murderous commitment to retrieving the diamonds when one an aged concentration camp survivor recognized him on the street of NYC’s diamond district. It would’ve been better for the old jew had his memory not been so sharp. In the death camps, Szell was a dentist, pulling gold fillings out of the mouths of doomed Jews. This sweet biographical detail is exploited in the films most famous sequence, when Szell interrogates Babe, which was described by many critics as doing “for dentistry what ‘Jaws’ did for family vacations at the shore.” The dental scene was followed by my all time favorite foot-chase with exceptional NYC location shooting. This scene constituted the second utilization, and the first to be seen by the public in a feature film, of the he just invented Steadicam, which would prove it be the most revolutionary instruments in film making to emerge between the invention of wide-screen and the appearance of CGI. Four years later, the technology potentials of the technology would be most fully demonstrated in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (later on this list). Considering the high caliber of the acting, both Hoffman and Scheider are excellent, it says a lot about the impact Oliver had in his much smaller role. He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and he won a Golden Globe in the same category. His Nazi ranked #34 in the American Film Institute’s top 10 movie villains. Is it safe? was ranked #70 on the 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes list. The dental torture scene puts this film on multiple “100 Scariest Moments” lists. There’s a legend attached to the film concerning the relationship with this veteran actor and the younger Hoffman, and old school acting styles verses the then dominant “method.” In it, Hoffman and method keep getting the short end of the stick. Hoffman objected in an interview: There is a story floating around that I told Olivier... When we got back to Los Angeles he said, How did your week go, dear boy? And I told him we did this scene where the character I was playing was supposed to be up for three days. He says, So what did you do? I say, Well I stayed up for three days and three nights. And the famous line was, Why dont you just try acting? And... it became kind of legend. Its been quoted so many times, at least in the acting circles. And the truth is I was the first one to quote that line... they leave out the reality and just put in what feels more provocative or a better story. And what accompanied him saying Why dont you just try acting? He said, you know... He laughed, because he said, you know, Im one to talk. And then he was actually the first one that told me about risking his life every night jumping whatever it was twenty feet in the last act of Hamlet. And the truth of it is I didnt just stay up three days and three nights for the scene; it was a good excuse, because these were the days of wine and roses in Studio 54. Perhaps, but there are other stories of their conflict fo styles and personalities. Hoffman and Olivier were rehearsing the climactic confrontation, and the younger actor objected to the scene written, leading to a rewrite the Glodman is famously bitter about having no say in, insisted upon both he and Oliver improvising the scene. Donald Spoto wrote, After a glance at Schlesinger as referee, Olivier had to muster all his professionalism to agree to something he neither believed in nor felt up to. The performers began walking around the rehearsal hall, with the only marked results for Olivier being a painful swelling in his ankles...Part of it,” says Goldman, who watched helpless, “was Hoffmans need to put himself on at least an equal footing with this sick old man.”...The spectacle pained everyone in the room and quickly became a talking-point in the industry. Trailer: youtube/watch?v=OK26KtN99R4 The dental chair scene: youtube/watch?v=dG5Qk-jB0D4&feature=related
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 23:53:03 +0000
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