The Odessa File | |
---|---|
Directed by | Ronald Neame |
Screenplay by | Kenneth Ross George Markstein |
Based on | The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth |
Produced by | John Woolf John R. Sloan |
Starring | Jon Voight Mary Tamm Maximilian Schell Maria Schell |
Cinematography | Oswald Morris |
Edited by | Ralph Kemplen |
Music by | Andrew Lloyd Webber |
Production companies | John Woolf Productions Domino Productions Oceanic Filmproduktion |
Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 128 minutes |
Countries | United Kingdom West Germany |
Language | English |
Box office | $6 million (North American rentals) [1] |
The Odessa File is a 1974 thriller film, adapted from the 1972 novel of the same name by Frederick Forsyth, about a reporter's investigation into the ODESSA: an organisation set up to protect former members of the SS in post-Second World War West Germany. The film stars Jon Voight, Mary Tamm, Maximilian Schell and Maria Schell and was directed by Ronald Neame, with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was the only film that the Schell siblings made together.
On 22 November 1963, the day of the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Peter Miller, a young freelance reporter in Hamburg, West Germany, pulls his car over to the curb to listen to a radio report of the event. As a result, he happens to be stopped at a traffic signal as an ambulance passes by on a highway.
He follows the ambulance and discovers it is en route to pick up the body of an elderly man who has committed suicide, leaving behind no family. Peter obtains the man's diary and learns the man was Salomon Tauber, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Salomon's diary details information on his life in the Riga Ghetto during World War II, (including the name of the SS officer who ran the camp, Eduard Roschmann). Salomon's diary catalogues all of Roschmann's crimes including the murder of a highly decorated Wehrmacht officer while attempting to flee at the end of the war.
Peter is filled with a determination to hunt Roschmann down and he sets out to meet famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who informs him about ODESSA, a secret organization for former members of the SS which is developing a missile guidance system for Nasserist Egypt. Wiesenthal explains that most of the Hamburg Police are members of ODESSA and not to be trusted. As Peter leaves he is accosted by Israeli Mossad agents who suspect Peter of trying to harm Wiesenthal. Peter manages to convince the men that his true mission is to find and bring Roschmann to justice. The Israelis propose to send Peter deep undercover in the ODESSA. Peter agrees to the mission and with the help of the Israelis, they provide him with a cover identity. Peter is to be a former SS soldier who died recently in a nearby hospital. He does not inform his girlfriend Sigi, who was attacked in an attempt to get the whereabouts of Peter.
The Israelis drill Peter on all details of his cover identity in preparation of meeting with ODESSA. Complete with a new cover identity, Peter gains access to the inner ranks of the ODESSA. After getting through his first test he is sent to get a fake passport from a forger who is working for ODESSA. While awaiting his train, Peter blunders by making a call to Sigi to assure her that he is OK. Thinking he is safe, he boards the train. Meanwhile, the ODESSA report back that Peter has made a call and they work out that Peter is not who he says he is. An assassin is dispatched to kill him. Peter meets with the forger Klaus Wenzer a shy insecure young man living with his mother. Klaus tells Peter to return after the weekend to take passport photos, but then calls him after midnight and tells him to return within the hour.
Suspicious, Peter rings Klaus' home from his hotel and having had no answer is wary, and sees the armed assassin who is waiting for him. Peter sneaks into the house and awakes Klaus' mother: she mistakes him for a priest and begs him to pray for her son. He then tackles the assassin and manages to kill the man. Whilst exploring Klaus' safe he uncovers a book, the ODESSA file, detailing every fake ID Klaus created and detail the real identity of those he created the fake IDs for. Peter takes the file and hides it in a train station locker, later giving the key to Sigi, lest anything should happen to him.
Peter victorious returns to the Israelis and details all he has found but refuses to disclose the location of the file until Roschmann has been apprehended. The Israeli agents reluctantly agree to Peter's demands and he then leaves for Roschmann's home where he finds him living an opulent life as a munitions factory owner using an alias. Peter manages to gain access to the mansion and evade his security before confronting Roschmann at gunpoint. Peter reveals Salomon Tauber's diary to Roschmann who attempts to deny everything, claiming Peter has been misled. Peter then discloses to Roschmann, Salomon's description of the murder of a fellow German Wehrmacht officer at the end of the war. Peter goes through the unique details of the cowardly murder and then discloses that the Wehrmacht officer was in fact Peter's father. Roschmann realising he is about to be exposed, panics and goes for his gun forcing Peter to defend himself. Peter returns fire at Roschmann killing the former SS officer who had killed his father.
The detailed ODESSA files obtained by Peter are used to arrest numerous Nazi war criminals including high-ranking members of the police. Later Roschmann's factory mysteriously burns to the ground before any rockets are delivered to Egypt.
Filming was done on location in Hamburg, Heidelberg, and Munich, West Germany and Salzburg, Austria; at Pinewood Studios, England; and the Bavaria Studios in Grünwald, Bavaria, West Germany. It was filmed with Panavision equipment, produced with Eastmancolor technologies.
The film's title song, "Christmas Dream", written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, was sung by Perry Como and the London Boy Singers, and heard as diegetic music over a car radio during the main titles of the film.
Simon Wiesenthal served as a technical advisor for the production. [2]
The film premiered at the 1974 San Francisco International Film Festival. The American Nazi Party staged a protest outside the theater but it was mistaken for a promotion of the film. [2]
The film has an aggregated score of 67% from 15 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. [3] Nora Sayre of the New York Times said, "The film makes its points methodically, almost academically. It also drags because there are many unnecessary transitional passages, devoted to moving the characters from one situation to another. Almost every occurrence is predictable." [4]
Jonathan Vincent Voight is an American actor. Throughout his career, he has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and four Golden Globe Awards as well as nominations for four Primetime Emmy Awards. In 2019, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Films in which Voight has appeared have grossed more than $5.2 billion worldwide.
Otto Johann Anton Skorzeny was an Austrian-born German SS-Obersturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS during World War II. During the war, he was involved in a number of operations, including the removal from power of Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy and the Gran Sasso raid which rescued Benito Mussolini from captivity. Skorzeny led Operation Greif in which German soldiers infiltrated Allied lines wearing their enemies' uniforms. As a result, he was charged in 1947 at the Dachau Military Tribunal with breaching the 1907 Hague Convention, but was acquitted.
Josef Rudolf Mengele was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician during World War II at the Russian front and then at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, where he was nicknamed the "Angel of Death". He performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers, and was one of the doctors who administered the gas.
The Boys from Brazil is a 1976 thriller novel by American writer Ira Levin. It was made into a film of the same title that was released in 1978.
Maximilian Schell was a Swiss actor. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg, his second acting role in Hollywood. Born in Austria, his parents were involved in the arts and he grew up surrounded by performance and literature. While he was still a child, his family fled to Switzerland in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and they settled in Zürich. After World War II ended, Schell took up acting and directing full-time. He appeared in numerous German films, often anti-war, before moving to Hollywood.
Klaus Kinski was a German actor. Equally renowned for his intense performance style and notorious for his volatile personality, he appeared in over 130 film roles in a career that spanned 40 years, from 1948 to 1988. He is best known for starring in five films directed by Werner Herzog from 1972 to 1987, who would later chronicle their tumultuous relationship in the documentary My Best Fiend.
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth is an English novelist and journalist. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Cobra and The Kill List. Forsyth's works frequently appear on best-sellers lists and more than a dozen of his titles have been adapted to film. By 2006, he had sold more than 70 million books in more than 30 languages.
Alois Brunner was an Austrian officer who held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) during World War II. Brunner played a significant role in the implementation of the Holocaust through rounding up and deporting Jews in occupied Austria, Greece, France, and Slovakia. He was known as Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man. In 1988, Simon Wiesenthal called Brunner "doubtless the worst" "living criminal of the Third Reich"
ODESSA is an American codename coined in 1946 to cover Nazi underground escape-plans made at the end of World War II by a group of SS officers with the aim of facilitating secret escape routes, and any directly ensuing arrangements. The concept of the existence of an actual ODESSA organisation has circulated widely in fictional spy novels and movies, including Frederick Forsyth's best-selling 1972 thriller The Odessa File. The escape-routes have become known as "ratlines". Known goals of elements within the SS included allowing SS members to escape to Argentina or to the Middle East under false passports.
Bruno Streckenbach was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He was the head of Administration and Personnel Department of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Streckenbach was responsible for many thousands of murders committed by Nazi mobile killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen.
Little Odessa is a 1994 American crime drama film directed and written by James Gray, in his directorial debut, and starring Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Moira Kelly, Maximilian Schell and Vanessa Redgrave. The title is a reference to Brighton Beach, a community in Brooklyn nicknamed "Little Odessa".
Karl Josef Silberbauer was an Austrian police officer, Schutzstaffel (SS) member, and undercover investigator for the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst. He was stationed in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during World War II, where he was promoted to the rank of Hauptscharführer. In 1963, Silberbauer, by then an inspector in the Vienna police, was exposed as the commander of the 1944 Gestapo raid on the Anne Frank House Secret Annex and the arrests of Anne Frank, her fellow fugitives, and two of their protectors, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman.
A Nazi hunter is an individual who tracks down and gathers information on alleged former Nazis, or SS members, and Nazi collaborators who were involved in the Holocaust, typically for use at trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Prominent Nazi hunters include Simon Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman, Serge Klarsfeld, Beate Klarsfeld, Ian Sayer, Yaron Svoray, Elliot Welles, and Efraim Zuroff.
The Odessa File is a thriller by English writer Frederick Forsyth, first published in 1972, about the adventures of a young German reporter attempting to discover the location of a former SS concentration-camp commander.
Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture, and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration camp, the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Eduard Roschmann was an Austrian Nazi SS-Obersturmführer and commandant of the Riga Ghetto during 1943. He was responsible for numerous murders and other atrocities. As a result of a fictionalized portrayal in the novel The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth and its subsequent film adaptation, Roschmann came to be known as the "Butcher of Riga".
François Genoud was a noted Swiss financier and a principal benefactor of the Nazi diaspora through the ODESSA escape network and supporter of Middle Eastern militant groups during the post-World War II 20th century.
The Kreisky–Peter–Wiesenthal affair was a political and personal feud in the 1970s, fought between the then Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky and the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, arising from Kreisky's ministerial appointments and the SS past of Freedom Party leader Friedrich Peter, which had been revealed by Wiesenthal.
Die Brücke is a 1959 West German anti-war film directed by Austrian filmmaker Bernhard Wicki. It is based on the 1958 novel of the same name by journalist and writer Gregor Dorfmeister. The story was based on an actual event, upon the personal report of a surviving veteran who in his own youth experienced a similar situation in World War II.
The Rose Garden is a 1989 American drama film directed by Fons Rademakers and written by Paul Hengge. The film stars Liv Ullmann, Maximilian Schell, Peter Fonda, Jan Niklas, Hanns Zischler, Alma Almagor as Ruthi and Kurt Hübner. The film was released on December 22, 1989, by Cannon Film Distributors.