Film #127: Marathon Man

After winning Oscars in 1969 for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and again in 1976 for All the President's Men, legendary screenwriter William Goldman scribbled down the novel Marathon Man as well as its corresponding screenplay. Produced in 1976, the movie is clearly flawed, yet still I count it as an enjoyable tension-fest from Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger. A long way from Ratso, Dustin Hoffman plays an athletic Columbia University student who, through the actions of his desperate CIA operative brother (Roy Schieder), unwittingly becomes enmeshed in an exiled Nazi's scheme to retrieve a vile cache of concentration-camp diamonds. Marathon Man's an often outneedly vulgar movie (the opening scene--an ugly NYC street battle between an elderly, alleged Nazi and a Jewish accuser--is particularly distasteful), and it's repeatedly stultified by a romantic subplot involving suspicious Marthe Keller (she's always a Euro-nothing in movies, and her male counterpart, the equally untrustworthy William Devane, could be considered an Amerinothing). So I'm not really making a case for loving this film, am I? That's 'cause I'm holding back on the one outstanding feature that makes it worth seeing. I mean, yeah, Hoffman gives his dim character enough cunning and vulnerability to keep us caring, but really this movie makes my cut based solely on the searing supporting performance delivered by Lawrence Olivier, who wholly dominates the proceedings as Dr. Christian Szell ("The White Angel"), the ice-cold Nazi physician looking for those gems he filched from Jewish victims.

In the movie's most famous and distressing scene, Szell terrorizes Hoffman with Novocain-less dentistry and the horrifyingly vague query "Is it safe?" (Olivier repeats the same line over 20 times during his first major appearance, and each time the line's said with a radically differing inflection; it's an astonishing movie moment that no doubt accounts for Olivier's ninth Oscar nomination; I do need to also praise Hoffman's performance opposite Olivier, even IF--and maybe BECAUSE--the two actors hated each other). Chalk it up to Olivier; because of his late-career charisma, Marathon Man overcomes Schlesinger's lazy drabness and huge plot problems--this is NOT one of William Goldman's most well-considered writerly moments--and remains a memorable bit of 70s paranoia. Even so, Marathon Man's also a prime example of a movie that could easily go unseen were it not for the presence of a single jewel.

Film #66: The Conversation

Gene Hackman and Francis Ford Coppola were white-hot in 1974. Hackman had already delivered Jan Troell's underrated Zandy's Bride with Liv Ullmann, and Coppola was finishing up The Godfather Part II when they quietly eked out The Conversation, one of the most unexpected masterpieces of the 1970s, which landed Coppola the International Grand prize at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. The film follows brooding surveillance expert Harry Caul (Hackman) as he obsesses over a recording he believes is of two people (Cindy Williams and Fredric Forrest) fretting over their affair and fearing violent repercussions from the woman's husband (Robert Duvall), who's the CEO of the imposing corporation who hired Caul to spy on the couple in the first place. His conscience starting to eat away at him, Caul makes attempts to withhold the surveillance results from Duvall and his plain-talking toady (Harrison Ford), but his moral stance backfires quite harshly on him.

With its bugging technology and crushing sense of paranoia, Coppola's original screenplay for The Conversation was quite timely in 1974, since Watergate fever was sweeping the populace (the script was written by FFC years earlier, however). This potent resemblance of life to art probably explains how the great film still managed a Best Picture nod while winning only two other nominations (for its screenplay and another for its sound). Hackman mysteriously escaped a nod for his about-to-blow portrayal of a man consumed with mistrust; it's one of the five best showings of his career (I love that see-thru raincoat he wears---it's yet another murky layer for us to peer through in this movie).

Also of special note is the fine editing and inventive sound design by post-production master Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient). The film might seem to creep along, but that's a result its possessing almost no musical score (what a relief) and a very spare plot--The Conversation is quite a bit more about its socially-withered lead character than it is about his latest case. In fact, the case is dropped as a focus about halfway through and picked up again twenty minutes after that. I think Coppola's film is all about a man who, by virtue of his stressful job, has a best friend (John Cazele) who isn't a confidant; a girlfriend (Teri Garr) who isn't a lover; and a rival (an excellent, irritating Allen Garfield) who isn't even an enemy. All the humanity in Harry Caul was long ago decimated by his snooping; he's now just a mere organic extension of his mechanical toys. (The fantastic final shot proves this, though it gives a strange sense of hope that Harry's gonna find another line of work to get into.)

This is a little-known fact, but The Conversation is based on the experiences of one of San Francisco's leading 1970s-era private eyes--the same P.I. who invented the-microphone-in-the-martini-olive. How do I know this? I live here in Brooklyn with one of his San Fran P.I. students, who told her he was interviewed by his close friend Coppola in connection with the movie!

I love The Conversation. It's a paranoia-steeped, post-Kennedy-assassination 1970s touchstone, just like Executive Action, The Parallax View and Targets, just to name a few in the subgenre. Finally, can I mention that The Conversation was advertised in 1974 newspapers with one of my favorite ad photos:And to think....you couldn't even show a toilet in a MOVIE until Psycho came along!!!! Fifteen years later, they'd be in the newpaper ads. Ahhh, sweet progress.