Good start, but then it gets ruined

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

A bit too slow to be considered a "thriller," in my opinion. The first hour or so drags on for some time until the movie finally begins to pick up steam. The torture scene, however, truly lives up to its reputation. Yikes!

Looks and sounds great even though it might not hold up to closer scrutiny. Having read the book first I think helped, but overall the movie moved at a decent clip and managed to stay tense so it was successful. I still don't get how people could buy Hoffman as a college student when he clearly looked 35, but I had that problem with The Graduate too, so maybe it's just me. Good movie but not an all time great or anything, just a solid twister with a great cast.

Dustin Hoffman is excellent as the protagonist in this well-written crime thriller set in New York City. Laurence Olivier is also very good as the antagonist.It's quite a complicated plot, involving family, Nazis, Jews, diamonds and running.

Based on the 1974 novel of the same name by William Goldman who adapted it for the screen, this is an engrossing and often very frightening thriller. The labyrinthine plot holds together surprisingly well, even if they were a few moments here and there where I found it slightly difficult to suspend my disbelief. While the writing is certainly strong, I don't think that it is of the same very high standard that Goldman set for himself in other films. John Schlesinger's direction is generally very good when it comes to maintaining a high level of tension but there are some rather silly and over the top bits which I found difficult to take seriously.The film stars Dustin Hoffman in an excellent performance as Thomas Babington "Babe" Levy, a history PhD student at Columbia University. Babe is a very damaged soul whose dissertation concerns tyranny in American political life. Not so coincidentally, his father H.P. Levy was a renowned historian who was hounded out of academia because of allegations that he was a Communist during the McCarthy era. The terrible stress that he was under led him to start drinking heavily and ultimately to commit suicide. In large part because Babe was the one who found his father's body 20 years earlier, he has never truly come to terms with what happened. As such, his dissertation runs the risk of being a personal crusade against McCarthyism as opposed to a detached contribution to the field of 20th Century American history. Babe is training himself to run in a marathon, hence the film's title, and I took this as being representative of the fact that he is trying to run away from his real life by dwelling on the past and not in the way that an historian should. Babe has quite a chip on his shoulder and, in spite of the fact that he is a good, decent man, he seems as if he is not always the easiest person in the world to get along with. However, I think that his experiences in the film help him to grow as a person.Although he probably only appears on screen for a quarter of the running time at most, Laurence Olivier nevertheless steals the show with his wonderful performance as the infamous Nazi doctor Christian Szell, who was reported dead in May 1945 but has been in hiding in Uruguay for more than three decades. A thinly veiled version of Josef Mengele, Szell is a dentist who was responsible for removing gold from the prisoners' teeth in Auschwitz as well as for subjecting them to various other forms of torture. Due to his all- white hair, he received the nickname of der weiße Engel, meaning "the white angel" (of death, presumably). During the war, he instituted a scheme in which he promised to help wealthy Jews escape from Auschwitz in exchange for their diamonds. Since then, he has been able to live in luxury by selling the diamonds, which are kept in a safe deposit box in New York. He has one of the keys whereas his brother Klaus has the other. However, Klaus - played by Hindenburg disaster survivor Ben Dova - is killed in a road rage incident in Manhattan. This means that Szell must take the major risk of travelling to New York himself in order to continue living in the manner to which he has become accustomed. In the extraordinarily effective "Is it safe?" scene, Szell tortures Babe by using a dental probe on his cavity in an attempt to find out whether it is safe for him to retrieve the diamonds. Olivier casts a terrifying shadow as Szell, never making the mistake of overplaying the role. In fact, the reason that he is so frightening is that he remains outwardly calm for much of the film, particularly during the torture scenes. He and Hoffman make an unlikely duo but they work extremely well together. Olivier received his only nomination for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar but lost to Jason Robards for his decidedly mediocre, boring performance as Ben Bradlee in "All the President's Men", another film starring Hoffman and written by Goldman. I had a few problems with the character of Henry "Doc" Levy, Babe's older brother who is one of the many couriers responsible for transporting the diamonds to Szell. Although he plays the role of an oil executive, Doc is in actuality an agent for the Division, an organisation which handles the matters that the CIA does not want to get involved in. The Division collaborates with Szell in his diamond scheme in exchange for information on other and probably less important Nazi fugitives. Roy Scheider is a very good actor and he has always had a likable screen presence but that's part of the problem, really. Doc should be a much darker or at least morally ambiguous character than he is but he comes across as a comparatively nice guy in spite of his involvement with an infamous Nazi, an approach which I did not think worked very well. In contrast, his superior Peter Janeway, played very well by William Devane, is very slimy and I would have preferred if the same was true of Doc. It is not often that I accuse a film of being too subtle but this is definitely the exception. Marthe Keller is quite strong as Elsa Opal, Babe's seemingly Swiss new girlfriend who is not entirely honest with him. Marc Lawrence and Richard Bright barely say a word but they are extremely intimidating as Szell's henchmen Karl and Erhardt. The film also features strong appearances in small roles from the great character actor Fritz Weaver as Professor Biesenthal and Jacques Marin as LeClerc.Overall, this is an extremely effective thriller but it could have been an even better one with slightly stronger writing and direction.