Word: szell
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...musicians are bewitched as much by his personality as by his musicianship. He insists that his players call him Slava, not maestro. He refuses to place himself on a pedestal higher than the podium. Herbert von Karajan once broke up a rehearsal when he spied a musician chewing gum. Szell was a tyrant. Toscanini's men loved him, yet trembled before his baton-snapping temper. "Sometimes," says Rostropovich in his near-impenetrable English, "conductor says to orchestra, 'You play for me and my ego!' No. Orchestra must not think conductor is god. Some day he is running quick to bathroom...
...Mengele has found his way into contemporary literature. In Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, he was the model for The Doctor who taunted God to punish him for his killings at Auschwitz. He is the inspiration for the drill-wielding Nazi named Szell in William Goldman's Marathon Man, and the mad doctor who sought to re-create a batch of little Hitlers in Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil...
Stubborn persistence in trying to follow the film's plot may raise as many questions as it answers. The following, however, is clear: a sadistic old Nazi named Christian Szell (Olivier) is hiding out in luxury among the flora and fauna of Uruguay. Szell has kept snug on fees he collected from Jews in concentration camps. To help them escape the gas ovens, he first accepted gold-often fillings from teeth, which he obligingly pulled himself-then diamonds. The diamonds are stashed in a Manhattan safe-deposit box, watched over by Szell's brother, who, as the movie...
...brother Doc is involved with Szell, a fact that Babe learns only when Doc comes staggering into his student digs, dying from a crevice that has been carved across his abdominal region. It is not long before Babe finds himself en during the dental ministrations of Szell, suffering horribly while the Nazi per forms some impromptu root-canal work in an attempt to extract information that Babe does not possess...
Oliver's role is at once more fun and a greater challenge. His ability to switch successfully from Dr. Szell, the traveling businessman, to Dr. Szell, the barbarous torturer and murderer, to Dr. Szell, the frightened old man, makes the evil Szell character believable in its horror, and gives the movie its strength...