Dustin Hoffman · 1976 · Signature Roles
Babe Levy is a graduate student and marathon runner in New York whose brother is a government agent and whose life is about to collide with a Nazi war criminal, Dr. Szell, played by Laurence Olivier.
Babe Levy is a graduate student and marathon runner in New York whose brother is a government agent and whose life is about to collide with a Nazi war criminal, Dr. Szell, played by Laurence Olivier. Dustin Hoffman plays Babe as an ordinary man drowning in a conspiracy he cannot understand.
The film’s most famous scene — Szell torturing Babe in a dentist’s chair, asking “Is it safe?” — is terrifying because Hoffman plays it without heroics. Babe screams, begs, and does not know the answer, because there is no answer. The performance is one long panic attack, sustained across the film, and it made Marathon Man a defining paranoid thriller of its decade.
Hoffman prepared by running, by studying, by staying in character’s fear. It shows. Babe is not a hero who happens to run. He is a runner who happens to be hunted, and the distinction is everything.