Babe Levy (Dustin Hoffmann) is a New York student working on a thesis connected to the death of his father, who killed himself after being subjected to one of the McCarthy “hearings”, something Babe clearly can’t get away from, and so doesn’t try. Apart from his training up to run marathons, if you go for that kind of psychology; the film certainly does. Babe believes his brother Doc (Roy Scheider) is some high-level businessman working from Washington, but in truth, he is involved in the shadiest parts of espionage work, where it’s okay to keep mass murderers safe as long as they are convenient sources of information.
Said mass murderer is Nazi Szell (Laurence Olivier), and he’s grown rather paranoid in his old age. Believing Doc to be part of a conspiracy to steal his retirement nest egg of diamonds, the old man eventually kills him. Because Doc, despite all his faults certainly a loving brother in his way, stumbles into Babe’s apartment to bleed to death there, Szell assumes the younger Levy knows something about his most probably imagined conspiracy, so he begins to threaten and torture Babe.
Babe eventually escapes and turns rather more lucky at vengeance than Szell could have feared.
It is one of the fine ironies in John Schlesinger’s often brutal and really rather wonderful paranoid thriller Marathon Man that Szell is very much the architect of his final doom, driven by madness and an immense guilt this monstrous little man could only ever channel into anger and violence to create enemies and his own final catastrophe by his own blind brutality and cruelty. Laurence Olivier plays up the basic horribleness and horridness of the man wonderfully, grasps enough of the pathos of the character to make him interesting and complex, yet also keeps well away from making this murdering Nazi bastard “sympathetic”; as Olivier plays him, he’s small, cruel and painfully human in his quotidian monstrosity – there’s a controlled restraint in the actor’s approach that’s absolutely right for what is happening here.
Hoffman’s Babe is just as driven by the shadows of the past and guilt as Szell is, but where Szell is actually as guilty as a person can be, Babe’s guilt is based on a past history he had no hand in shaping and bears no responsibility for. In truth, Babe starts out as the innocent his name suggests (the script by William Goldman based on his own novel and apparently doctored by Robert Towne isn’t subtle about these things), and is dragged into growing out of assumed guilt into accruing some of his own through machinations he has little control over. I have seen Babe’s development read as the process of him growing up, but I’m not quite cynical enough to understand “learning that your loved ones are lying to you about the most crucial elements of their lives, and being involved in several violent killings” as growing up. I can’t imagine Babe after this as nothing but broken, dysfunctional and utterly alone, having shed the guilt for what his country did to his father only to have to replace it with one all of his own, however much the film tries to sell its ending as a happy one. To be fair, there’s also a second thematic strand about endurance (another reason for the marathon running) under horrible circumstances running through the film, but its darker thematic vein isn’t just richer, it is also much better embedded into the deeper strata of the film itself, at least to my eyes.
There’s a deep sense of urban paranoia running through much of the film; there isn’t only the heavy burden of hidden or at least unresolved history to carry, the characters also have to cope with a world where betrayal is a given as if it were a natural law. In the Paris and New York of this film, it’s a given that your partner and your lovers will betray you, that your brother’s friend is a rat, and so on. Though, in a curious sense of fairness, the worst of us, like Szell, can’t rest easy either.
On a cinematic level, this is a rather fantastic film. Schlesinger, whose body of work I generally find inconsistent but genuinely interesting, creates dark, grubby versions of New York and Paris that fit the grim and desperate tone of the film perfectly. Even by day, this particular version of the world is dominated by shadows and only the coldest of artificial light; everything is grubby, grimy, and used-up. Even the Paris Opera looks as if it had seen better days.
The suspense scenes follow classicist Hitchcockian forms, but Schlesinger often adds little notes of historical verisimilitude here Hitchcock would have avoided, probably very consciously keeping to the film’s main theme of the psychologically (possibly psychically) disfiguring burden of history and guilt. These scenes are often incredibly tight and tense, be it Szell torturing Babe dentally, Babe’s ensuing escape attempts and eventual escape, or the long, final sequence in which a panicked Nazi war criminal makes its way through a Jewish part of New York (at a time when you’d still meet quite a few survivors of the concentration camps there). The film’s actual finale isn’t much of one, in comparison, with a strong whiff of studio executives getting cold feet when confronted with the consequent grimness of Goldman’s initial ending. The rest of Marathon Man is so strong, the mildly botched ending isn’t much of a problem however.