Marathon Man

Some time back, I purchased a two-DVD set of Marathon Man and Black Sunday. That set seems to be out of print, but Marathon Man is available as a standalone, so I finally got around to watching it over the weekend.

The movie starts off interestingly. Two old guys are driving in the Manhattan traffic of the mid-1970s when they get into a fender-bender. As happens in such things, the two men get out and bicker, at which we learn that they're both of German descent. One is a Jew, and the other apparently a Nazi sympathizer, which makes things a little more heated. A chase ensues, which results in the both of them driving into a tanker truck and getting killed in the resulting explosion.

We then get several other scenes that will wind up being related, but don't seem like it at first. One is of a man nicknamed Babe (Dustin Hoffman). He wants to run marathons, and he's also a graduate student in history, writing on the Joseph McCarthy era because his father killed himself after getting caught up in the blacklists. There's also Doc (Roy Scheider) who is some sort of spy since he's putting something in the bottom half of a small box of chocolates and transporting it to a go-between in Paris. And there's Szell (Laurence Olivier), who is living in South America but cutting his hair in preparation for a trip to New York.

So how do they all come together? Szell, as it turns out, was a notorious concentration camp commander, but a venal one who would let Jews escape in exchange for huge payouts. At first that meant gold, since it's what the Jews had in their teeth (if that sounds offensive, that's not my thinking but more or less an actual line from the movie), and then working his way up to diamonds. Doc is apparently transporting diamonds to get in Szell's good graces or something in an attempt to bring Szell down. And Doc is also Babe's brother. Lastly, the old Nazi who died in the opening scene? That was Szell's brother, who had one of the two keys to the safety deposit box where the diamonds are being kept. Szell is coming to New York to get those diamonds.

Things get complicated, however. Doc goes to confront Szell, who responds by slashing Doc to death with a retractable knife he's got up his sleeve. It sounds like an even nicer weapon to have than George Macready's little friend from Gilda, or the sleeve gun that Kenneth More had in The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw. But before Doc dies, he's able to tell Babe what's going on, in the bizarre hope that Babe will complete the mission, because good comsymps like Babe's father would have wanted the Nazis to get their comeuppance, even 30 years on. But Babe isn't a spy by any means.

The idea behind the story is a good one, but the movie as a whole didn't quite come together for me. There were some scene that I liked, such as the opening leading up to the crash with the oil tanker. But there were others that I found almost pointless, like the flashback scenes to Babe and Doc's father. It also takes all the disparate plot points to come together and get to the real action of the movie. Even then, the plot seems a bit muddled.

I can't blame any of the actors. Dustin Hoffman does OK, even in spite of the apocryphal story about why they call it acting. Roy Scheider is quite good even if he does get bumped off halfway through the film, and Olivier is excellent as the elegant beast. I think the biggest problem with the movie is the script.

I looked through the IMDb reviews, and Marathon Man seems to be a movie that sharply divides reviewers. I think I'd be marginally positive, but not as positive as a lot of the reviewers. So this is one you should certainly watch for yourself if you haven't seen it before.