The Odessa File

A film set in Germany in 1963. Peter is a freelance journalist. On the night the Kennedy assassination is announced he is driving about and follows an ambulance. The dead man is Jewish. Old, alone, he has killed himself in his own flat and left a diary behind. Peter reads it. The man was held in the Riga ghetto and names the SS officer who ran it. That man is alive. He escaped after the war, changed his name, and set up a business in Germany. Peter decides to find him. From there the film becomes a story of infiltration. There is a network of former SS men helping each other, and Peter looks for a way in. A false identity is prepared. He will present himself as a former SS officer; for that he memorises a name, a unit, a past and a set of habits. The interrogation scenes are the film's most tense. Those facing him are testing him and one wrong answer is enough. What the narrative is interested in is not hunting Nazis but continuity: the film is about who went on with their lives after the war without ever being punished. Peter's own reason opens at the end and sets the narrative's personal axis. The source is Frederick Forsyth's novel. The officer in the book is a real person, an SS commander who served in Riga, and the novel's popularity brought his name to a wide public. The music is by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the opening song is sung by Perry Como. Jon Voight, Maximilian Schell, Maria Schell and Derek Jacobi are in the cast. Ronald Neame directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes spy thrillers of the 1970s. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; the narrative builds slowly and the ending is rushed.