Marathon Man (1976)
Directed by John Schlesinger
A graduate student and obsessive runner in New York is drawn into a mysterious plot involving his brother, a member of the secretive Division.
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What critics compared Marathon Man to
Lockhart tries to solve the mystery that’s contained by the Alpine castle and embraced by its docile residents, but it’s a lot of toing and froing, alleviated only occasionally by vivid scenes of horror: most notably, the extended death throes of a wounded elk and an episode in a dentist’s chair that rivals the one in Marathon Man.
So off he goes, ending up at the facility -- a centuries-old castle run by a doctor (Jason Isaacs) who has a Germanic accent and deploys the sort of dentistry we haven’t seen since Marathon Man.
When the upstart stockbroker tries to retreat down the mountain, a car accident finds him becoming the alpine fortress’ newest patient; incest, hardcore gaslighting, pornographically opulent set design, enough creepy nurses to make Lucile Hadzihalilovic blush, and the most agonizing display of dentistry since “Marathon Man” ensue.
By throwing in some Nazi overtones via blond haircuts and Marathon Man references, Verbinski firmly connects contemporary Californian wellness bullshit to the nastiest of European body-narratives.
Isaacs appears to be channeling a Nazi stereotype—something accentuated by a scene lifted from “Marathon Man,” yet another of the obvious influences here.
There are sequences involving eels that make eels seem even creepier than they did already, and a dentistry-as-torture scene that makes the one in “ Marathon Man ” look like a routine cleaning.
"Oldboy" contains a tooth-pulling scene that makes Laurence Olivier's Nazi dentist in " Marathon Man " look like a healer.
It should be noted that Oldboy contains scenes of intense violence, including one dental workout that puts Marathon Man to shame.
It’s mental and physical torture of the kind applied by Laurence Olivier as the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man when he asks Dustin Hoffman, “Is it safe?”
William Devane plays an underwritten upper-rung syndicate crook much like the one he played in Marathon Man, where he was in cahoots with Laurence Olivier?s torturous Nazi dentist.
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The result is a Jewish “Death Wish,” to borrow Pauline Kael’s description of “Marathon Man,” amped up to epoch-changing proportions, made by a gentile writer-director with an unlimited appetite for celluloid, right down to its highly flammable properties.
The clever script turns the Magic Mirror on the Wall into a "Dating Game" host, and features an unforgettable exchange between Lord Farquaad and the Gingerbread Man that suggests an encounter between Mother Goose and "Marathon Man."
(That’s where a Holocaust survivor encountered a Nazi doctor in John Schlesinger and William Goldman’s shameless, faux-ethnic Marathon Man. ) These Uncut Gem lowlifes are black athletes and Russian mobsters — so much for the “diversity” of Sandler’s genial Grown Ups franchise.
There’s the famous, maybe apocryphal story of Dustin Hoffman telling Laurence Olivier that he stayed up three days to prepare for a scene in “Marathon Man,” and Olivier replying, “Why don’t you just try acting?”
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Nonetheless, there is some compensation in a particularly unpleasant torture scene, where Bond suffers the most barbaric dental treatment since Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man .
(As Laurence Olivier legendarily told Dustin Hoffman when the younger star was agonizing over his motivation in the tooth-drilling sequence of Marathon Man: "Dear boy, why not just try acting?")