This movie accomplished what 2001’s Spy Game tried and failed to.

Cool as it is, it’s funny how Marathon Man is what Chinatown would have been had Roman Polanski not rightly revised Robert Towne’s watered down script for that masterpiece from 2 years prior to this. Towne subsequently came in to write a similar “Hollywood Horseshit” — in the words of the source novel’s author William Goldman — conclusion to Marathon Man at the behest of an actor (Dustin Hoffman).

That aside, there’s plenty of genre-comparative allegory and spy junkie exploitation to go around in this classic action-spy flick. Like a simple but painstaking camera pan across the paraphernalia of a Nazi in exile.