Dr. Christian Szell, a former Nazi dentist now living in South America, comes to New York to recover stolen diamonds — and terrorises a young student who knows nothing about them.
In Marathon Man (1976), directed by John Schlesinger, Laurence Olivier plays Dr. Christian Szell, known as the White Angel, a war criminal who has lived in Paraguay since the Second World War. When his brother dies, Szell travels to New York to collect diamonds he stole from his victims, and he becomes convinced that Thomas Levy, played by Dustin Hoffman, a graduate student and marathon runner, knows where the diamonds are.
Olivier plays Szell with a quiet, almost gentle menace. He is polite, precise and utterly ruthless, and his famous dental torture scene, in which he repeatedly asks Levy, Is it safe?, is one of the most frightening sequences in 1970s cinema.
Marathon Man is a tense thriller about the past catching up with the present, and Olivier’s Szell is its nightmare: an old man who has never paid for his crimes, and who will do anything to protect his fortune.