Thomas ‘Babe’ Levy, a history student at Columbia University, has just started to date the wonderful Elsa when they are mugged in the park by two well-dressed men. This is during the period when his brother Henry, a successful oil business executive, has paid him a surprise visit but later staggers back to Babe’s apartment to die of a vicious stab wound. Babe is thrown into a disorientating game of cat-and-mouse. Who can he trust? One of the best thrillers of the 70s and it has that infamous ‘dentist scene’.
Marathon Man brought together two of the screen’s biggest all-time stars and talents, each from a different era. Dustin Hoffman came to prominence in the 60s and 70s and has stayed there or thereabouts ever since. Laurence Olivier had been the actor’s actor since the 1930s. Both excel here. A story circulated for a long time that Dustin Hoffman (being a “method actor”) stayed up all night to play a character who has stayed up all night. Arriving on the set, Sir Laurence Olivier asked Hoffman why he looked the way he did. Hoffman told him, to which Olivier replied in jest “Why not try acting? It’s much easier.” Hoffman repeatedly denied the story, and finally cleared up the matter in 2004. The torture scene was filmed early in the morning, Hoffman was going through a divorce from his first wife and was depressed, and had spent the previous two nights partying hard. Hoffman told Olivier this and his comment related to his lifestyle and not his “method” style of acting.
Certificate: X
2 hours 5 min
PRIME (£2.49) YOUTUBE (£2.49)
Director: John Schlesinger
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider
