Marathon Man (1976)
Greatest Films (www.filmsite.org and www.greatestfilms.org)
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Marathon Man (1976) is a scary nightmare thriller, best known for the suspenseful pursuit scenes and a truly repellent scene of torture.
Doc Levy (Roy Scheider), an American secret agent, who is thought to have stolen a valuable cache of diamonds, is killed by evil ex-Nazi Szell (Laurence Olivier), an ex-concentration camp dentist by profession. Szell has come to New York City to retrieve the fortune in diamonds from a safe deposit box. Szell kidnaps Doc's brother, lone, idealistic Jewish graduate student Babe Levy (38 year old Dustin Hoffman as a mid-20s grad student), who knows nothing about his brother's involvement.
In the most memorable torture scene, Szell uses his dental instruments for sadistic oral surgery to torture and extract information from Babe. Szell is the essence of evil and disturbingly effective during the torture, repeatedly asking Babe the question:
Is it safe?
Created in 1996-2008 © by Tim Dirks. All rights reserved.
