Christian Szell, one of the great villains in thriller history.
That can refer to McCarthyism or fascism in general but it’s embodied in Marathon Man by Dr. But the theme of tyranny is a good pathway towards understanding exactly what makes Marathon Man and so many other paranoid thrillers so paranoid in the first place: people in power have done terrible things to their victims and will do it again if we let them. It’s been many years since I read Goldman’s novel but my impression from watching the film again recently is that these character details might work better on the page than they do on screen, and it’s entirely possible to watch Marathon Man and forget all about them, especially with so much spy-on-spy violence and Nazi dentistry going on.
He’s a history PHd student working on a thesis on the subject of tyranny, and it’s clear that what happened to his father has grown into an obsession that he’s hoping to expunge through his doctoral work, but as it turns out the thriller plot he’s about to become ensnared in will be far more cathartic than any doctoral thesis ever could be. “Babe” Levy (played by Dustin Hoffman) is our protagonist and titular marathon man, a nervy academic trying to redeem his blacklisted father, who we learn committed suicide under the terrible pressures the Red Scare of the 1950s brought down on him.
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