Word: voight
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Some interesting and normally intelligent actors are involved in this nonsense. Robert Shaw is the master crook, and Martin Ritt, better known as a director (Hud, Sounder, Conrack), plays the Swiss cop who is his nemesis. Jon Voight plays Ritt's assistant - and unwitting tool - while Jacqueline Bisset does time as lover to both Shaw and Voight. Their skills are all frittered aimlessly away in a movie that offers slowness of pace as an earnest of artistic integrity. The only emotion that the audience is likely to work up watching this unconscionable bore is an irresistible desire...
...sense, as in the case of a ballad sung in suitably Gilbert-and-Sullivanish style by Greg Minahan, as a response to Otto da Fe's discovery of half the cast in the act of escape from his deadliest dungeon. But in the first act, especially, not even Voight Kempson's professional choreography makes the songs more than pleasant breaks in the action...
...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...
ALTHOUGH JON VOIGHT performs wonders as Conroy--he is both sensitive and charismatic, full-bodied and full of wit--he doesn't have to carry the film. The 21 non-professional kids (all from the Georgia coast) act up a storm. When Voight's Conroy introduces his class to Brahms and Beethoven, or, in an effort to blow the lard from their brains, punctuates his classroom questions with a bike horn, we are gratified not only by the teacher's love and cleverness, but by the responses of his kids--abashed, suspicious, delighted, and finally openhearted...