Nazi-Hunting

By JAY COCKS

THE ODESSA FILE Directed by RONALD NEAME Screenplay by KENNETH ROSS and GEORGE MARKSTEIN

A subtitle might be useful for The Odessa File, something like How I Stumbled on a Nazi Plot, Infiltrated a Secret Organization, Hunted Down a Mass Murderer, Saved Israel and Spared My Self-Respect.

The movie is an adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's foolscap bestseller about a German journalist who happens onto The Big Story. An old man, a Jew, kills himself and leaves a diary behind. The diary is a chronicle of concentration-camp horror, especially of the bestiality of a commander called Roschmann (Maximilian Schell), who killed, along with some 60,000 others, the diarist's wife. The diarist remembered Roschmann vividly, even though the commander had dropped from sight. Nearly 20 years later he was spotted at the opera, and the Jew reported him to the police. The official response was polite dismissal. The old Jew killed himself.

The journalist (played by a grimly floundering Jon Voight) mounts a one-man crusade to avenge that death. But after allowing himself to be beaten up, employed by Israeli intelligence, threatened with quick extinction by murderous closet Nazis, and finally pushed under the wheels of an oncoming train, it becomes hard to believe that it is only the romance of investigative reporting that is driving him drearily on. In comparison to Voight's unswerving dedication, Beatty's mania seems just about as workaday as a deskman collecting box scores from the local high schools.

Indeed, it turns out that there is more than rampant professionalism involved here, but Forsyth and the screenwriters reserve this information for a snapper ending. It seems that Voight's father, long dead, was a . . . but let the movie hold on to its arthritic surprise. It is just about all it has. The Odessa File has lumbering yearnings to be a kind of fictional semidocumentary. It invokes Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, whose name is listed in the credits as an adviser and who even appears, played by an Israeli actor, as a futile attempt to lend the project a little importance, like using the name of a prominent figure on a foundation letterhead.

Director Ronald Neame (Tunes of Glory, The Poseidon Adventure) has his Nazis parading about like villains in old World War II propaganda melodrama, with delicatessen accents and eyes like hooked fish. Anyone could blow the whistle on Nazis like this. qedJay Cocks

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