宝琳凯尔影评 Running into Trouble

Marathon Man starts with the amplified sound of breathing. What is it? Some rough, snuffling beast? With embarrassment, one recognizes the nasal-clogged exertions of Dustin Hoffman running around the Central Park reservoir. Has a parodist taken over the sound controls? No,it's just that Marathon Man, a project that seemed a lead-pipe cinch to be the kind of visceral thriller that makes audiences almost sick with excitement, has fouled up right from the word go, and nothing in it works quite the way it was meant to.

Hoffman isn't an ideal choice for the runner, Babe Levy-a poor but brilliant Jewish graduate student at Columbia, the younger son of a famous historian driven to suicide by charges made against him during the Mc Carthy era. This script takes Hoffman back to the age range of The Graduate, and someone like the tall, skinny Lenny Baker (the hero of Next Stop, Greenwich Village ) , who exactly fits the description William Goldman gave in the novel, might have been fresher, more convincingly naive. Yet Hoffman acts young, has never before looked so fit,and there isn't a bum note in his performance. It doesn't come to anything,though. The way the Goldman book is constructed, we watch a giant trap being set: on three continents, various agents, couriers, and big-time hoods are engaged in a vast criminal action converging on the defenseless student. Babe is unaware of the impending horrors, but the suspense operates at all levels for us, since we see the malignancy closing in on this joking patsy. The book was a best-seller because Goldman is an unconscionable master at squeezing the reader; he involves us in the hero and turns the heat higher and higher, making the forces arrayed against Babe so hideously ruthless that anything Babe can do in retaliation will seem justified. The chase story is infused with righteousness, since the head conspirator, Szell (played here by Laurence Olivier), is a surviving Nazi war criminal, obscenely rich and arrogant, with a fortune derived from robbing the Jews in the death camps, and the student is a symbol of intelligence, moral strength, and endurance. Babe is punched around,tortured, and deceived, and then, when he's on the run and doesn't seem to have a chance, he shows what's in him. It's Death Wish with a lone Jewish boy getting his own back from the Nazis. It's a Jewish revenge fantasy. But in the movie our curiosity is never stimulated. Instead of setting up the situation and showing Babe's encirclement, the director,John Schlesinger, opts for so much frazzled crosscutting that there's no suspense. There isn't the clarity for suspense.

It's understandable that Schlesinger might be too proud to reproduce Goldman's sweatbox techniques, but those techniques are integral to the story. If you're hoping for elegance, don't begin with William Goldman.Probably a director like William Friedkin ( The French Connection, The Exorcist ) could have believed in the material and engineered an equivalent of the book-a movie that would have pounded audiences to a helpless pulp. And if a gullible talented director wasn't available, a crude hack could have done the dirty deed. But Schlesinger is a Faust who just couldn't live up to the pact he made. His fantasies may or may not be more sophisticated than William Goldman's, but they're certainly different. For Goldman, competitive fraternal badinage spells love, and the relationship between Babe and his older brother, Doc (Roy Scheider), is like the male gamesmanship in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and most of his other scripts. Schlesinger is probably too aware to play these games, but When the central brotherly-love relationship is cut to a minimum, there's nothing much left except Babe's victimization, suffering, and revenge. And even that doesn't hold together. Like Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust,Marathon Man seems to have lapses of attention, as if the director had lost track of the action.

Schlesinger keeps the cast under control, and his work is professional,yet he never gets a grip on how the scenes should play. We don't have the fun and excitement of being tantalized by terror. Babe's meeting with Elsa(Marthe Keller) and their love idyll lack the frightening undertones that are needed, and the film shows the two being mugged by Nazi henchmen without ever explaining why. Babe's neighbors-Puerto Rican kids who rib him-are directed with the same heavy spirit and unvarying rhythm as the rest of the action. When the movie retains Goldman's zingers, such as the revelation of Doc's relationship with the government agent Janeway (William Devane), Schlesinger seems to back away from them, and with the cheap kick gone there's nothing to take its place.

The advance stories on Marathon Man have been about the lavish caretaken by its perfectionist producer, Robert Evans, yet seven million dollarsand two years of planning haven't bought even a very good-looking movie.A producer's care may be greatest after the irredeemable mistakes havebeen made. In preparing the film script, Goldman apparently wasn'twarned off some of the most troublesome aspects of his book, and sinceSchelsinger doesn't get the viewer's insides knotted, the holes in the plotare big and gaping. Why is Doc in an unholy alliance with the Nazi villain,Szell? Szell's fear that Doc means to rob and kill him sets the whole plot inmotion, yet there's no indication that Doc does intend to, so Doc'scharacter is left an utter cipher. And though the best sequence in the movieis Szell's stroll through New York's West Forty-seventh Street diamondmarket (it was the best passage in the book, also), what the devil is hedoing there? The explanation we're given-that he needs to ascertain theprice of a carat-is so tacky it's a howler: he's been living off the sale ofdiamonds for thirty years. Even worse is the false expectation set up by themysterious political crimes of which Babe's father was accused. Apparently, this is just a moral flourish meant to provide a background for thebrothers, but such a point is made of the McCarthy persecution that wekeep expecting it to have some connection to Szell's ring of thieves.There's more background than foreground in Babe's character, and theactors have so little time for characterization that the people in walkthrough roles (such as Marc Lawrence and Richard Bright, as Szell'sgunmen) actually come off best.

Goldman's imagination must have been fed by movies like Livesof a Bengal Lancer, in which sticks were driven under Gary Cooper'sfingernails and set on fire but he never betrayed his comrades-in-arms.Marathon Man has to have been conceived in this same boys'-bookrites-of-manhood universe. (The hero of The Great Waldo Pepper,whichGoldman also wrote, dreamed of fighting an air battle with the No. 11 74German ace; there's considerable consistency in the writer's fantasies.)Babe is no more than Destry Riding Again as a Jewish pain freak. Hisheroism is proved by the amount of punishment he can take, and Szell hasbeen made a dentist so that he can torture Babe by cutting live nerves.Dentistry has never been very photogenic, and, because of one's indifference to the outcome of this scene and of the other, more gruesomebloodlettings, the only emotion one is likely to feel is revulsion at thegeneral unpleasantness. There are enough Schlesinger films by now toprovide ample evidence that he has no talent for violence. (Jon Voight'sassault with a telephone was the most grotesque piece of staging inMidnight Cowboy.) A director doesn't have to be able to do everything,but he should have some idea of what he can't do. Still, it's not hard toguess why Schlesinger attempts material that lesser directors can do better.Directors working on action films they don't believe in haven't necessarily"sold out." This may be the only work they could get, or their best chancefor a box-office hit that would put them in the winner's circle and buy thema little freedom to operate in. You don't work for Robert Evans these daysunless you work on a thriller. That's fine for some directors, but not forSchlesinger, and when he stages a chase, with Hoffman on foot beingpursued by a car full of killers, his heart, understandably, isn't in it.Marathon Man is his worst film ever. To cap it all, running around with cutnerves gives Hoffman more of an excuse for that gasping sound. Can youimagine what he'd do if he played in Humoresque or Golden Boy? With aviolin to breathe to, he'd be the Paganini of snuffters.