By Scott Ross
This dark, visceral adaptation by the screenwriter William Goldman and the director John Schlesinger of Goldman’s “What-If?” novel about a Mengele-like Nazi in South American unavoidably drawn to New York City was one of the first “R”-rated movies I ever saw, and as Laurence Olivier’s Szell does to Dustin Hoffman’s Thomas “Babe” Levy with his dental equipment, it took the top of my young head off. I’d never seen anything like it before, and although I’d read Goldman’s book the year previously, the movie of Marathon Man shook me to the core. I’m not sure if it was the violence, always sudden and genuinely shocking, or the blood (which I gather was toned down for the Ratings Board) or perhaps the total, lacerating effect, that did such a number on me but I well remember having to pull myself out of my seat when the lights came up and maneuver outside the theater on legs that suddenly didn’t seem entirely solid any longer. It was perhaps the most visceral movie experience I, at the age of 15, had ever had.
Sitting down recently with the new Kino 4K UHD disc of Marathon Man — a superbly engineered scan of the original negative that surpasses every previous digital release and makes the movie look better than at any time since its original run in 1976 — I felt something strongly akin to the same feverish response I’d experienced then. Pauline Kael was put off by the movie’s classical realism, believing the book’s potboiler-thriller status called for a slicker, whorier approach, but I disagree; Schlesinger’s elegant verisimilitude, captured in Conrad Hall’s extraordinary, deep-saturated imagery, gives the pulp plotting both a stylish patina and a prevailing sense of dread that drenches the narrative like a fever-dream from beginning to end. As the scenarist, Goldman cleverly re-imagined his exciting novel for the screen, and his increasingly frightening use of the question “Is it safe?” briefly became a part of the American cultural language… and inspired a new fear of your friendly neighborhood dentist only slightly less pronounced than the sheepish terror with which swimmers regarded the sea a year earlier, during the theatrical run of Jaws.
I have been musing lately that, surprisingly to me, Dustin Hoffman is either the star or one of the stars of five movies dear to me (The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man and Tootsie), several others (Papillion, Agatha, Straight Time, Ishtar, the television Death of a Salesman, Wag the Dog) I’ve admired to greater or lesser degrees depending on their qualities, and a few about which I have ambivalent feelings (Little Big Man, Lenny, Kramer vs. Kramer, Rain Man) not because of his performances but for other reasons. Yet, strangely, I never considered him a favorite actor. Perhaps he’s too easily ridiculed for his narcissistic perfectionism, the same traits for which his character Michael Dorsey is sent up in Tootsie, to be taken as seriously as I now realize I should have. I still recall with pleasure the Hoffman puppet on the British “Spitting Image” who, conspiring with a similarly caricatured Walter Matthau in a plot to dominate the world kept whining nasally, “I don’t think my character would do that.” I am also, I suspect, influenced by Hoffman’s unfortunate appearances on Blu-ray and DVD documentaries in which he makes such ludicrous statements as, “Screenplays are just blueprints”, and my increasing awareness that no single anecdote he’s related about the making of the pictures he’s been in has borne more than a passing resemblance to the truth.*
The repellent aspects of Hoffman’s personality have nothing to do with his looks, about which he whinges continually and self-pityingly. (Indeed, there are numerous shots of him in Marathon Man where, with his fashionably long shaggy haircut — worn in part to disguise the fact that he’s a bit too … is “mature” the polite word?… for Babe Levy, Goldman’s angry, bewildered graduate student drawn into an escalating, increasingly violent maelstrom — he looks shockingly like the young Tom Cruise. At these moments, and against the odds for an actor with a nose as prominent as his and with a mouthful of such badly-spaced teeth, Hoffman seems, as long as he keeps his mouth closed, almost pretty.) What causes my reservations are the accounts by writers — Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade, Larry Gelbart in Laughing Matters — of his on-set or rehearsal behavior, such as the gut-churning afternoon Goldman describes in which Hoffman goaded the very frail Laurence Olivier into long (and, for Olivier at that stage of his life, agonizing) bouts of physical activity, presumably out of his own terror of acting with a genuine theatrical legend. This is the picture, after all, in which Hoffman’s determination to create the proper haggard look during Babe’s torture at the hands of Szell to him meant staying awake for days and to be out of a breath for a scene required running around the block, which occasioned Olivier’s famous rejoinder, “Why not try acting, dear boy?” Despite Olivier’s equanimous demeanor toward his co-star, and his generosity as a fellow actor, there’s a barb hidden in that gentle bon mot, and not one I think we need begrudge the old Knight.
However masochistic his “process” (to use the actor’s word for preparation) and however difficult he has been to work with, however, with Hoffman the proof is in the pudding, and he seldom disappoints. From the ostensible beginning of his movie career (he had a small role in the screen adaptation of Murray Schisgal’s play The Tiger before being cast in The Graduate) he has consistently given performances that are, perhaps uniquely for an actor with his stage experience, scaled entirely to the movie camera. Not even Olivier, widely and reflexively regarded in the 1960s and ’70s as the Greatest Actor in the World, had such admirable consistency when it came to acting on film. Before Marathon Man, he had a tendency to ham it up, or at least to be notably bigger than life, which while it could yield delightful results in the right vehicle, such as the movie of Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth, was disastrous in things like his own 1965 film production of Othello, in which he gives the single worst performance by a major star in a Shakespearean role I’ve ever seen. Hoffman, whatever his faults as a collaborator, is only ever big when the role, or the moment, requires it. It’s hard to imagine any actor at the time, of his age and limited film experience, giving the beautifully detailed rendering of comedic panic Hoffman gives in The Graduate, for example, even granted Mike Nichols’ guidance. And while he is perhaps a little too imitable in Midnight Cowboy (“G’head, g’head”) and Rain Man (“One minute to Wapner”) there is nothing artificial in those performances either; although they just miss the heartbreak we expect of them, they’re technically perfect. Even in the somewhat outrageous drag role of Tootsie’s Dorothy Michaels, the sweetness and decency of the comic contrivance gets filtered through the essential loneliness of her creator, culminating in one of the great comic characterizations in American movies, a performance to put on the shelf alongside Jack Lemmon’s in Some Like it Hot and Gene Wilder’s in The Producers. Although, at close to 40, Hoffman exceeded Babe Levy’s age by 15 years, and while he was certainly not the tall, gangly youth Goldman describes, he gives a performance of edgy intelligence, haunted by his father’s McCarthy era suicide and by his own anxieties, pushed nearly beyond endurance by the Kafkaesque circumstances of the novelist’s plot and emerging from it with his spine stiffened and his soul intact. It was Hoffman who objected to this Jewish boy becoming a kind of vigilante, and you can see his point; Goldman disagreed, and preferred the ending of his book, and that’s understandable too.
As Szell, Olivier is the smoothest, most reasonable — thus, most terrifying — Nazi imaginable. Unless you are aware of how physically depleted he was in 1976, you’d never guess it from his performance. Goldman’s Szell, famously sporting a head of white hair during his concentration camp period (Der Weisse Engel, as his victims knew him), shaves it for his trip to New York, and Schlesinger further wanted Olivier to grow a mustache. His Lordship demurred, suggesting his director instead “use my mean little mouth.” Schlesinger did. (He also scarred up that mouth.) Olivier, as with so many of his contemporaries, like Gielgud, worked from the outside in rather than, as is usually the case with American actors, the reverse, and the details that brought his characters alive often came from elsewhere. Observing the way a gardener tended his roses, for example, gave him one of the insights that make his performance as Szell so fascinating: He approaches his dentistry with the gentleness of a lover, which makes his sudden imposition of torture on Babe so shocking. As usual with Olivier, there are little moments that excite, and that delight you by their perfect instinctual quality. Here it’s the exclamation of uncontrolled glee, self-consciously choked off for the benefit of the bank guard on the other side of the door, with which he responds when Szell sees just how many diamonds are waiting in the safe-deposit box.
(Parenthetically, Szell’s field of medical expertise is one of two aspects of Goldman’s book about which I am skeptical. One understands the rise of Mengele, on whom Szell was clearly based, and whose horrific experiments on camp inmates were anatomically based. But while there were certainly dentists in the camps, skilled at removing the gold from the teeth of exterminated Jews, would a DDS obtain the kind of reputation equaling that of a Mengele? It seems unlikely. Similarly, why does Szell need to visit the Jewish diamond district in Manhattan to determine current rates of exchange on gems? Couldn’t he get that information from his American handlers, or if he didn’t trust those men, send his own aides to the library? Although Szell’s walk through the diamond exchange is one of the book’s, and the movie’s, highlights, you have to wonder if it was really necessary.)
Employing a sly literary device, really little other than the code-name “Scylla,” Goldman kept from both Babe Levy and the reader the knowledge that the PhD candidate’s beloved older brother “Doc” is actually the deadly shadow-government courier whose chapters alternate with those concerning Babe; only at the moment of Scylla’s horrendous death did the reader become aware, with a shock, that he and Doc were the same character. Similarly, Scylla’s deep-state compatriot and lover Janeways is introduced in the novel, sans any reference to sex, as “Janey,” leaving the reader to assume the character is a woman. So there was a nice shock there as well when Janeways showed up in Babe’s apartment and he and Scylla were suddenly revealed, to the reader, as having been male/male, not male-and-female, lovers. Obviously, these devices cannot translate to the more surface-oriented world of film. Similarly, the homosexual relationship between Scylla and Janey, more or less explicit in the novel by the way they speak to each other, is hinted at more obliquely here, notably by the way William Devane cradles Roy Scheider’s injured hand with his own; Schlesinger, one of the few great “out” filmmakers of his time, was notoriously shy of including overt homoerotic references in his movies. (Aside, obviously, from Sunday, Bloody Sunday, which he commissioned from the screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt and silently co-authored.)†
The Scylla/Janeways relationship, like Doc’s profession (and the fact that both are assisting the old Nazi Szell) was more than a literary trick: These ruses went with the espionage the story revolves around — Goldman wanted to keep his readers off-balance, confused and upset and disoriented by things so dark they seemed to defy sane, rational belief. This is what I mean by my headline, above. If more of my fellow Americans really knew, and understood, what their government has been up to for decades… if they realized that the same banks and families, here and in Britain, that bankrolled Marx and Engels and Lenin (and Mao) also backed Herr Hitler (and inspired his mad embrace of eugenics) even as they supported those allied against them… if they comprehended that the complicity of such people went hand-in-hand with the profiteering and pro-Nazi activities of the Dulles brothers and the Rockefellers and the progenitors of CIA (then the OSS) and the bringing to the United States of unrepentant Nazi scientists to work in our government organizations… and that these same attitudes and insane predilections are at play in our government’s current lethal support for Ukrainian Nazi battalions in a collective deranged rush to nuclear confrontation… it would be pretty to think those Americans might demand a change. But then, the last man in a position to make that change, and who intended to effect it, had his head blown off at high noon on a Dallas street.
Roy Scheider, who lent so much substance to the movies of my adolescence and whom I miss more than I can say, gives one of his standard superb performances as Babe’s laconic, dangerous brother. Scylla is, as Goldman describes him in the novel, in exceptional shape physically (his hands are his weapons of choice) and Scheider is so trim and well-muscled he does push-ups at a right angle to the floor, his toes pressing into his Parisian hotel room bed. He also clearly performs his own stunt-work in the fight with the milky-eyed Chinese assassin played by James Wing Woo, a sequence whose brutality is as notable as the elegance of its appointments. (I’m thinking especially of the blood-stained diaphanous curtains on Scylla’s terrace seen by the confused elderly man in the wheelchair across the boulevard, a touch which feels directorial, especially since, as in the book, Goldman’s published screenplay places the fight in a London park.) I suppose that, even in the more ethnically diverse, antiheroic 1970s Scheider’s tough, broken-nosed prizefighter look made him a harder sell as a leading man even than Hoffman, despite his having starred in Jaws. Whatever the case, he had fewer great roles in great movies than he deserved and it’s impossible, at least for me, to imagine Marathon Man without him. William Devane provides a nice mix of charm and menace as Janeways, flashing that Kennedy-like, toothy grin of his seductively and speaking in a comforting, reasonable voice Babe rightly finds suspicious. (In the novel, Babe equates him to Jay Gatsby.)
While as these things go the loss of Goldman’s clever literary conceits is a relatively small one, it’s still a loss… although less of one than our not understanding why Doc made the trek to Babe after being disemboweled, explained in a sequence early in the novel and in the screenplay, which Schlesinger shot but subsequently cut from the picture, in which Scylla goes somewhat mad at the killing of an old adversary by callous agents in an airport men’s room: In the book, Scylla explains his reaction to himself by admitting that he feels his own violent death is imminent and he wants to die with someone who loves him. Conversely, the Olivier character’s ironic demise — well and truly hoist on his own petard — is more satisfying in the picture than in Goldman’s book. The confrontation between Babe and Szell in the movie was written by Robert Towne (and I presume, his weirdly silent partner Edward Taylor) and Goldman hated it. I concede he had a point in considering Babe making the villain eat diamonds “Hollywood bullshit,” and I sympathize as well with those who roll their eyes at Szell accidentally impaling himself on the knife he’s trying to kill Babe with. Let’s just say that when I saw Marathon Man as a teenager I had not yet experienced the old Production Code-era cliché of the villain falling on his knife, and the thing still works for me. It’s certainly more interesting and exciting than Goldman’s climax, in which Babe simply shoots Szell down. (Re-reading the book again, I was struck by how many scenes of violence Goldman set in public greenery: Scylla’s encounter with the Chinese assassin; the fatal meeting between him and Szell; and his finale. That’s not to mention Babe and Elsa being assaulted in Central Park. Was there something about urban parks Goldman found oddly suggestive of violence?)
This brings us rather nicely to the subject that most talked about in 1976 when Marathon Man was new. The violence in the movie is sudden and bloody, but as with the later The Silence of the Lambs, it’s the threat hanging over the action that makes the picture feel like a bloodbath. It’s violence meant to disturb, and unsettle and not, as is and was the case with so many contemporaneous action movies, to titillate. One of the conventions of the James Bond movies of the period that used to bug the hell out of me was the way dozens, sometimes seemingly hundreds, of the villain’s minions are killed, usually by gunshot or explosion, and all without a droplet of blood being spilled. That sort of mayhem, done painlessly to armies of anonymous extras, is the essence of un-felt violence, the kind which causes us to shrug and which after enough exposure can inure us to the suffering of others. Schlesinger felt that Marathon Man was about enduring pain, psychic and emotional as well as physical, and I think he was correct. He and Goldman not only put their characters through the ordeal; they put the audience through it as well.
For a movie which so keenly depicts a major city during its time of decline (two cities, really, since the early Scylla sequences in Paris are so creepily memorable, and Schlesinger was able to capture the grungy effects of a garbage strike on the streets) four of Marathon Man’s most striking settings — two exterior, two interior — are either created, disguised or wholly out of place: The scenes of Szell’s exile in and covert escape from Uruguay were shot at the Los Angeles Arboretum; the interior of the supposed Columbia University library was shot at USC; the Central Park Zoo Waterworks used in the finale was the creation of the Production Designer Richard MacDonald; and the brightly-lit orange fountain structure behind Scylla and Szell at their fatal confrontation was Herbert Bayer’s Escheresque “Double Ascension” sculpture at the ARCO Plaza, also in L.A. The first three are well integrated into the movie, but that last is so striking, particularly as the location for one of the picture’s most shocking sequences, that its inclusion is as puzzling in its way as the soccer ball that comes sailing out of the darkness of the Paris Opera façade after Scylla has discovered the body of his Parisian contact, a deliberately surreal effect designed to keep the audience as off-balance as Scylla feels at that moment. There are a couple of notable continuity errors in the picture as well, at the beginning, just before Szell’s brother (his father in the novel) and the irritable old driver Rosenbaum ram into the oil truck at full speed. In the first instance, the alter kaka’s distinctive green boat of a car is seen pulling around the corner into traffic behind the German but the next cut shows the old crank (Lou Gilbert) arguing with his mechanic. The second, also minor, involves the man guiding the oil truck as it backs up, whose breath is visible on the street… on a day when Rosenbaum’s radio tells us it is unseasonably warm for September in Manhattan. I’m sure you can, if you are so inclined, find dozens more mistakes cited by the obsessives who habitually post to the Internet Movie Database. I mention these because I’ve seen the picture so many times that noticing the (to me, anyway) rare anomalies of a remarkably professional endeavor has become almost a secondary pleasure in watching it.
Other, more traditional pleasures include the extensive use of the then-revolutionary Steadicam system, introduced in the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory earlier in 1976 and which was so necessary for capturing Babe in motion; the occasional, effective flashbacks to Babe’s childhood; the late Michael Small’s eerie, disturbing electronics-heavy score with its addition of an effect by the keyboardist Ian Underwood which Small accurately described as “a kind of scream”; and the splendid supporting cast whose members include the great Fritz Weaver as Babe’s crisp doctoral advisor, Richard Bright and Marc Lawrence as Szell’s German henchmen, Tito Goya as the leader of the Puerto Rican street-gang that harasses Babe, Jacques Marin as Scylla’s highly suspect Parisian contact, Michael Vale and Harry Goz as jewelry salesmen, the magnificent Lotte Palfi Andor as the old woman on 47th Street who spots Szell, and the impossibly (self-)named Ben Dova as Szell’s brother. Even Marthe Keller, as Babe’s meet-cute girlfriend, the enigmatic Elsa Opel, manages to give an effective performance, aided I suspect by Schlesinger’s use of her; there is a shot of her at the Reservoir where Babe does his practice runs in which, after he has passed she looks into the middle distance with a troubled, slightly wistful glance, that conveys something unreadable about her character which, in retrospect, feels like a clue. Schlesinger and his editor, Jim Clark, weave in footage of the Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila from the 1964 Olympics during Babe’s runs which, while compelling, would be even more useful if we could see his feet: Bikilia won his Gold Medal running barefoot, and the parallel with Babe Levy becomes explicit, and vital, when, after he makes his escape, he, also barefoot, is chased through the early morning streets of New York by his captors.
Although Goldman never directly identifies Scylla and Janeways’ agency (“The Division”) as CIA, and in fact deflects the notion, the implication is obvious.‡ I don’t know whether the author of Marathon Man knew about Operation Paperclip, although I assume he did. But as the devolution, at least since the killing of Jack Kennedy (and, I would argue, long before that officially sanctioned murder) of the American Experiment and the growing strength of its permanent unelected government make clear, Hitler was the American ruling class’s ideal model from the beginning. His portrait should hang in the vestibule at Langley, in a hallowed spot just to one side of that hilarious carving from the Book of John: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
Pull the other leg, boys.
*Just try changing a blueprint on a whim while you’re constructing the building, and see what you end up with.
†Oddly, in Brothers, his novelistic sequel to Marathon Man, Goldman seems to have had second thoughts about Scylla, who, rescued from death, given plastic surgery and put on ice for years by The Division until it requires his services, is now entirely heterosexual, complete with an ex-wife and one-night stands with women. Talk about disorientation!
‡Janeways, to Babe: “Now, when the gap gets too large between what the FBI can handle effectively and what the CIA doesn’t want to deal with, that’s where we come in.”
Revised text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 