- John Schlesinger's Marathon Man is a decent cloak-and-dagger suspense story bracketed by two absolutely absurd scenes. As the film opens, a chance encounter between a German anti-Semite and a comically abrasive New York Jew culminates in a deadly and improbably explosive car chase. In one of the film's final scenes, Thomas "Babe" Levy (Dustin Hoffman) forces a fugitive Nazi named Szell (Laurence Olivier) to eat the very diamonds that led him to torture and/or kill anyone who may have discovered his real identity. Metaphors anyone?
- By comparison, the rest of the film seems like an exercise in plausibility. Despite leading a relatively innocuous life as a perpetually marathoning grad student, angry young Babe gets dragged into this whole Nazi business by his older brother Doc (Roy Scheider), who works for a mysterious "Agency" that exists in the gaps that the CIA and FBI can't quite fill. Doc and his partner Janeway (William Devane) had been on friendly terms with Szell, but that was back before he initiated his most recent series of purges. Now the former Nazi and his hired goons (Marc Lawrence and Richard Bright) are out to wipe the slate clean, even if that means targeting Babe and his new, coincidentally Teutonic girlfriend Elsa (Marthe Keller). Hey, wait a minute...
- In my mind, Marathon Man is notable primarily as a vehicle for its justifiably famous scenes involving a dental chair and some unnecessary drilling. Here, the always superb Olivier chews precisely the correct amount of scenery, repeatedly asking "Is it safe?" while refusing to provide any further context. Torture is scary enough, but dental torture while being asked a question you don't even understand is downright terrifying. More striking still is that just when you think Babe has escaped, he finds himself back in the chair. Not a great enough scene to make up for the rest of the film, but certainly iconic enough to remember.
