Director John Schlesinger’s movie Marathon Man came out in a different era of film-making. Although it’s certainly an iconic movie, with stars like Dustin Hoffman, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Roy Schieder, it was only nominated for a single Oscar (Best Supporting Actor, for Olivier). It did well at the box office, but Marathon Man‘s not something you see on television as often as its Academy Award co-nominees: Rocky, Carrie, Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, Network.
I wonder if that’s in part because of the change in the attitude toward torture in America over the past three decades. Maybe we don’t like tobe reminded of just what it is ot the kinds of people who have used it historically. During one of the DVD retrospectives, William Goldman, who wrote the book the movie is based on and the original screenplay, said that at one of the screenings he attended, somone stood up and denounced what they vieweed as gratuitous violence in the movie, which is remarkably tame by today’s standards, although there are moments that should make almost anyone squirm.
The most famous, of course, are two short dental torture scenes, in which Olivier, as Nazi war criminal Christian Szell uses simple dental instruments to torture “Babe” Levy (a grad student in history who was played by the 39-year-old Hoffman). The acts depicted in the scenes involved nothing more than physical restraint and procedures carried out in any dental office in the land, just without the benefit of anesthetic. They were clearly intended to be recognized as torture when Goldman wrote them in the early ’70s. They were clearly recognized as torture when the movie came out in October of 1976. They looked like torture to me again when I watched it the other night. But a little nerve pulp drilling certainly wouldn’t qualify as pain equal to organ failure. It wouldn’t even cause the feeling of suffocation and imminent death that waterboarding does. I wonder if Attorney General Michael Mukasey would consider having his own teeth drilled without anaesthetic to be torture.