Deleted airport fight scene and uncut version

"Isn't it enough that Hoffman threw his star power around to get the final showdown between he and Olivier changed?"

Yes,that sucks. I liked the ending of the original novel much better.

SPOILERS!

Babe shoots Szell in balls and tells him how all the jews that he tortured are waiting for him to torture him with dentist drills. Then,while Szell is in horrible pain and is almost dead,Babe shoots him,throws the diamonds away and in the end gets arrested.

I really don't know was Hoffman little bit of a pussy (or kiss-ass) because he didn't want to kill Laurence Olivier's character in such graphic way or he didn't want his character to be put in jail.


"(and it remains something of a mystery whether the scripted finale was filmed or not)."

Sorry roeg,but i can tell you for sure that they never filmed original ending. William Goldman got pissed of because of it and because they cut original introduction of Roy Scheider's character.


If you want to know some background info about some of the problems which occured during the first previews,type this in google search:

FSM: Marathon Man (Michael Small)


Here is one part from that page with few words from director John Schlesinger and editor Jim Clark:


The film had its first, successful sneak preview in what the filmmakers described as “Clint Eastwood country,” but a second preview, held in San Francisco, proved much more problematic. According to Clark, “I guess it was the politics of the people of San Francisco coupled with the fact that the air conditioning had broken down. It was hot as hell in there and whenever there was violence on the screen people were shouting ‘Fascist rubbish!’ and things like that.”

Schlesinger felt that “instead of turning on to the emotions, audiences were turning off to the effects of the violence.” He decided to make significant cuts in the more violent scenes, removing the gory shots of Szell’s fountainside disemboweling of Doc and significantly trimming the dental torture of Babe, losing graphic inserts filmed by Clark. Most significantly, Schlesinger eliminated Scheider’s original introduction, a scene retained from the novel in which Doc loses control and kills two assassins after they murder another veteran agent. For Goldman, this was a “grievous” cut, as the original scene established Doc’s vulnerability, showing him as “a guy who’s dead but won’t lie down” and giving Doc’s scenes with Babe a stronger emotional subtext. “Without that eight-and-a-half-minute scene, you see a superstud.”

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