The Odessa File (film)
| The Odessa File | |
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| Directed by | Ronald Neame |
| Produced by | John Woolf |
| Written by |
Kenneth Ross George Markstein |
| Based on |
The Odessa File 1972 novel by Frederick Forsyth |
| Starring |
Jon Voight Maximilian Schell Maria Schell |
| Music by | Andrew Lloyd Webber |
| Cinematography | Oswald Morris |
| Edited by | Ralph Kemplen |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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130 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom West Germany |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $6 million (North American rentals) |
The Odessa File is an Anglo-German 1974 espionage thriller film adaptation of the novel The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth, about a reporter's investigation of a neo-Nazi political-industrial network in post-World War 2 West Germany. The film stars Jon Voight, Maximilian Schell and Maria Schell and was directed by Ronald Neame, with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was the only film which the Schell siblings made together.
On 22 November 1963, the day that President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Peter Miller, a young freelance reporter, pulls over to the curb to listen to a radio report of the event in a district in Hamburg, West Germany. 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 Jewish Holocaust survivor who had committed suicide, leaving behind no family. The reporter obtains the diary of the man, which contains information on his life in the Second World War Riga Ghetto, and the name of the SS officer who ran the camp, Eduard Roschmann. Miller is startled to find that in one passage the diarist mentioned seeing Roschmann shoot and kill an SS officer who was wearing an unusual military decoration. Miller realizes from these details that the officer mentioned was his own father.
Determined to hunt Roschmann down, Miller consults with Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal who informs him about ODESSA, a secret organization of SS veterans. With this information, Miller then dares to go undercover, using an assumed name and forged papers showing him as an SS veteran. He joins and infiltrates the ODESSA and finds Roschmann, who now runs a high-tech company which plans to send radio gyroscopes and biochemical warheads to Egypt to use against Israel. Miller eventually finds Roschmann, confronts him at gunpoint with his knowledge about his father's murder, has a chance to shoot him in revenge, but does not.
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