“Is it safe?” It’s the screech of the dentist’s drill, the frantic dash of a man trying to forget the death of his father, a victim of McCarthyism and who is confronted head-on with the death of his brother, murdered before his eyes. It’s a significant part of 20th century history, the ghosts of the Holocaust that continue to haunt subsequent generations. It’s Paris, it’s New York, dirty, violent, hostile. Seven years after Midnight Cowboy, Schlesinger reunites with Dustin Hoffman, the embodiment of the youthful, humanist, and anguished student. Opposite him, the great Laurence Olivier as a former Auschwitz executioner, a cheap Mengele who comes to rekindle the embers of Nazism (Golden Globe for his performance), and in solid supporting roles, the wonderful Roy Scheider and William Devane. Adapted from William Goldman's eponymous novel, a paranoid thriller steeped in its time, and a pinnacle of the genre.
William Goldman's novel Marathon Man was published in 1975. He himself wrote the screenplay adaptation just a year later, commissioned by Robert Evans for Paramount. Evans hired British filmmaker John Schlesinger to direct, who had already directed Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy in 1969. A typical paranoid thriller of the 1970s, Marathon Man is distinguished by its edgy and realistic style, its chaotic atmosphere reflecting the violence and moral decay of the era, and its geopolitical ramifications where the traumas of 20th century American and European history, particularly the ghosts of Nazism, loom large. Dr. Szell, played by Laurence Olivier, is inspired by Dr. Mengele, the SS chief physician of the Auschwitz extermination camp, who went into hiding in South America after the war. While Conrad L. Hall handled the film's cinematography, Marathon Man also marks one of the very first uses of the Steadicam in a feature film by its creator, Garrett Brown. The use of the technique is particularly striking in the sequences where Dustin Hoffman runs around the Central Park Reservoir (notably the opening scene, which encapsulates all the film's central themes). And in the scene where Szell wanders through a teeming Manhattan, recognised by an elderly Jewish woman who accosts him and tries to have him arrested. Here, the Steadicam contributes to creating an ethereal, ghostly atmosphere within the gritty New York and polluted Paris of the 1970s.
