Marathon Man, Marathon Man, Doin' the Things a Marathon Can

A couple of weeks ago, I started watching MARATHON MAN on cable, and got a third of the way through it before I had to leave and do something else. So I naturally rented the dvd and watched the whole thing.

When I was a kid in the '70's, our house had a premium movie channel (it fluctuated between HBO and Showtime, depending on who our local cable company had a contract with); and so I saw the first few minutes of MM a few times. But I wasn't interested in watching the rest; a thriller that starts out deliberately-paced but gets gradually nastier was not my thing.

But now I seem to be catching up on my '70's paranoid political thrillers. Early last year I watched ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, which has several aspects in common with MM: Both were released in the Bicentennial year (oh, the irony!); both deal with our government doing nasty things; both are written by William Goldman; both star Dustin Hoffman; and the gang burglary of Hoffman's apartment in MM plays like a parody of the Watergate burglary as depicted in ATPM.

As anyone who's watched it can attest, MM does the paranoid thriller bit about as well as it's been done since Hitchcock. It takes a fantastic story of spies and Nazi war criminals, and makes us feel it's plausible by tying the events into common fears --like the unease of taking a bath by yourself in a dark apartment; or (naturally) the dread of dentistry. It features one of my favorite types of heroes: The thinking man, who's not a man of action but who is pressed into having to use his abilities to survive. And it manages amazing swings in its point of view: Laurence Olivier's character seems omnipotent when he's torturing Hoffman; yet he becomes believably anxious, high-strung and vunerable when he ventures into the jewelry district (and by the way, why couldn't he just look up the value of diamonds in the financial pages? Or telephone a jeweler? Oh well . . . .)