The Odessa File Blu-ray Review
Imperious Bastards
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, April 30, 2012
After successfully turning the ocean liner Poseidon upside down, director Ronald Neame took on
a different challenge: upending the world of a young German reporter who stumbles into a global
conspiracy by former Nazi officers in
The Odessa File, based on the second novel by bestselling author Frederick Forsyth. Although the
screen adaptation of Forsyth's book made significant
changes, especially to the ending, Neame's film retained Forsyth's essential perspective, in which
psychology and motivation took a back seat to logistics and action. The same approach worked
effectively in Fred Zinneman's film of Forsyth's first novel,
The Day of the Jackal (the original 1973 film, not the unfortunate 1997
remake with Bruce Willis), and Neame was too smart a
director to fix something that wasn't broken.
But where Zinneman faced the challenge of telling his story through a protagonist who happened
to be a cold-blooded assassin (hired to kill French president Charles de Gaulle), Neame had a
different problem: that of a central character, Peter Miller, who quickly gets in way over his head
and makes one risky choice after another, endangering both his own life and that of his adoring
girlfriend, and all for reasons that seem less than compelling until they finally come into focus
late in the story. A big part of Neame's solution was to cast Jon Voight, still young but already a
familiar face after the success of
Midnight
Cowboy. Voight's blond hair and blue eyes made him
a convincing young German of the early Sixties, and he mastered German-accented English with
astonishing accuracy (at least to my ear, and I spent a lot of time in Germany in the Seventies).
Voight's ability to command an audience's sympathy, which had been so effective in playing Joe
Buck, proved invaluable in his portrayal of Peter Miller, who needs to keep the audience on his
side, even when he behaves thoughtlessly, as he often does.
Neame shot much of the film on location, which gives
The Odessa File an authenticity that can't be faked on a backlot. Fortunately for
Blu-ray fans, Image and Sony have provided a fine and
faithful transfer, so that viewers can appreciate every detail.
The film opens with a brief prologue in the Middle East and text screens providing background
and vouching, in Forsyth's name, for the authenticity of the film's historical research. In 1963,
the principal enemy of Israel was Egypt, which, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, had
assumed leadership of the Arab world. Nasser's military is believed to be building missiles with
chemical and biological warheads to be used against Israel, but the weapons are useless without a
precision guidance system, which is being developed somewhere in Germany by "the Odessa".
The Odessa is an acronym for
Organisation der
ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, which translates as "organization
of former SS officers". The civilian scientists building the guidance technology don't realize they're working for the Odessa or the use for which their
work is intended.
Against this background, we're introduced to Peter Miller (Voight), a freelance journalist in
Hamburg, who, on the night of President Kennedy's assassination, follows an ambulance to what
he thinks may be a crime scene and stops to investigate. But Miller's buddy on the Hamburg
police force, Karl (Gunnar Möller), tells him it's nothing, just an elderly man who committed
suicide. A day or two later, though, Karl slips Miller the dead man's diary. It contains a
remarkable story.
The dead man is Salomon Tauber (played as a young man in black-and-white flashbacks by
Towje Kleiner, with old-age narration supplied by Cyril Shaps). He is a survivor of the Riga
concentration camp, presided over by a brutal SS officer named Eduard Roschmann
(Maximillian Schell). In harrowing detail, Tauber recounts the many atrocities committed by
Roschmann, both personally and through orders to subordinates. Roschmann was so much a law
unto himself that he killed fellow Germans who got in his way. Tauber personally saw
Roschmann execute a German army captain who attempted to use a ship to evacuate wounded
German soldiers, in violation of Roschmann's claim that the ship was reserved for the SS.
Despite his editor's lack of interest, and against the urging of his live-in girlfriend, Sigi (Mary
Tamm), and his devoted mother (Maria Schell), Miller begins to investigate Tauber's account.
He immediately makes a shocking discovery. Tauber's final diary entry reports that Roschmann
disappeared in 1945, just ahead of the advancing Russian army. But when Miller speaks to
Tauber's friend, Marx (Martin Brandt), another camp survivor, he learns that Tauber saw
Roschmann exiting the opera in Hamburg just a few weeks ago. When he reported what he'd
seen to the police, they dismissed his account for lack of evidence. He killed himself in despair.
It's Marx who first mentions Odessa to Miller. Miller relays this to his cop friend, Karl, who
immediately gets jumpy and begs him to drop the matter. The government office charged with
investigating war crimes is equally unresponsive, even overtly threatening. Miller decides to
pursue the matter on his own and immediately reveals his ineptitude by "infiltrating" a reunion of
former Panzer division officers that looks and sounds like a Nazi war rally, complete with thinly
veiled rhetoric and toasts resembling "sieg, heil!" salutes. Miller's youth makes him conspicuous
among these old-timers, but he's so oblivious to the danger that he starts taking flash photos, at
which point he's ushered out and beaten.
Eventually, Miller leaves town and begins the arduous process of making contact with Simon
Wiesenthal (Shmuel Rodensky), the famous Nazi hunter, whose address is a closely guarded
secret to protect him from his many enemies. When they finally meet, Wiesenthal shares his file
on Roschmann and advises Miller on where to look for further information.
It isn't long before Miller's path crosses that of the Israeli secret service, who recognize in Miller
a perfect candidate for infiltrating the Odessa. Miller accepts the assignment despite the
enormous danger, because Wiesenthal has told him that the key to locating Roschmann is finding
the man whom Odessa uses to create new identity papers for former SS officers to "rehabilitate"
them as respectable members of society. The forger turns out to be a mild-mannered fellow
named Wenzer (Derek Jacobi, not yet famous for
I, Claudius), who is deeply devoted to his
mother and has kept meticulous records of every identity he's ever faked for the secret society.
Meanwhile, the Odessa is frantically trying to find Miller by keeping a close watch on Sigi in
Hamburg. An efficient assassin named Gustav Mackensen (Klaus Löwitsch) has been brought in
to handle the work, and he has the assistance of strategically placed members of the Hamburg
police department. If Miller were a professional spy, he might anticipate this possibility, but he
isn't—and he doesn't.
The Odessa File is both an entertaining thriller and a textbook example of the "invisible" style of directing that has largely disappeared. As
you watch the film, you're unaware of Neame's
directorial guidance, and yet it's there at all times. It
has to be for the film to sustain suspense so successfully for its 128-minute running
time, despite the lack of major action scenes and a story that unfolds almost entirely through dialogue. Neame keeps his takes short and cuts
frequently
but not abruptly. He has people moving in the frame, but in casual motions that fit naturally with
what they're engaged in at the moment, and he has the actors deliver their lines in a heightened,
urgent style that's almost theatrical (it helps that they all have accents).
All that cinematic energy creates a world in which the Third Reich is still a palpable reality for
the characters, even the ones who say they want to forget it. (If it didn't still feel so real, they
wouldn't be trying so hard to forget.) Indeed, what distinguishes
The Odessa File from the
typical American Seventies paranoid thriller is the clarity of its enemy. In films like
3 Days of the
Condor or
The Parallax View, the harried protagonist is never entirely sure who the enemy is that he's trying to
defeat (or escape). But in
The Odessa File, Peter Miller knows exactly who the enemy is. The problem, first, is finding him; second,
forcing him out into the
light; and finally, deciding what to do with him. The last one turns out to be tougher than Miller
expected.
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