Marathon Man (PATREON PREVIEW)

Unclear and Present Danger

Jamelle Bouie

Tv & Film, Society & Culture, History

4.7 • 660 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For this week's Patreon episode, we watched the 1976 thriller "Marathon Man," directed by John Schlesinger, written by William Goldman, and starring Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider, William Devane and Marthe Keller. In "Marathon Man," Hoffman plays a graduate student who becomes entangled in a plot by a Nazi war criminal — and his U.S. government allies — to recover stolen diamonds.

The film reflects an of-the-time fascination with the afterlife of the Nazi regime, and especially those Nazis who escaped to South America. We have nothing but positive things to say about this movie and our conversation was interesting as well. You can find "Marathon Man" for rent or purchase on iTunes and Amazon and for streaming on Paramount+. There is also a new 4K blu ray to check out, if you're so inclined.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey folks, this is Jamel, and you're listening to a Patreon preview.
0:12.7	You can hear the full episode over at patreon.com slash unclear pod.
0:17.5	For just $5 a month, you get two episodes each month on the political and military thrillers of the Cold War.
0:24.5	Please enjoy this little snippet of our conversation.
0:34.9	Yeah, and I think that that idea that the entire establishment, there's no protection in it,
0:42.4	and that, you know, these evil forces have kind of infiltrated these supposedly benign democratic
0:52.4	institutions comes through clearly in the cyn the in the cynicism of the
0:57.6	movie and i think it's it's that's also another reason why it's kind of so upsetting um but yeah like
1:03.7	there's nothing wrong with this guy really he's a he's a nice fellow he's a smart guy he's a little
1:09.6	alienated but he finds himself undercirc. You know, sometimes you have thriller heroes who sort of have obvious problems, right? And that's why they're alienated from society. And you see that in 70s movies, too, not thrillers so much, but you have like the kind of, I don't know, Travis Bickle type figures who are socially maladjusted.
1:28.1	This guy's not particularly socially maladjusted.
1:30.5	It's just that society itself is really quite, you know, threatening.
1:37.3	I mean, the way it depicts New York is really threatening.
1:39.3	Like, he's harassed by these, you know, these street tufts on his block. Like, he's sort of a lonely guy and
1:47.4	in a context that's quite threatening. And then the actual menace is much deeper than he
1:53.4	thought, which I think also kind of like, again, appeal to people's sense of the danger of the
1:57.8	times is that, you know, it was a deeper paranoia that that was behind
2:02.7	that. It's interesting, like, because, like, the, and it's depictions of Judaism or Jewish
2:08.5	Americans, like, he's obviously, you know, a very, he and his brother are assimilated, middle class,
2:17.3	intellectuals. And then it depicts, you know, the kind of world of, middle class, intellectuals.
2:18.4	And then it depicts the kind of world of more recent immigrants,
2:23.2	Eastern Europeans who are in the diamond trade, orthodox maybe.
	...

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