ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 9, 1996 TAG: 9611120134
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
SOURCE: DENNIS ANDERSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
ADOLF EICHMANN organized the delivery of millions of Jews to concentration camps. Sunday night at 8, TNT cable presents a movie based on his life.
In addition to the movie roles that have won him critical acclaim and a best-actor Oscar, Robert Duvall has a body of work in television that could earn him the title of history teacher to the masses.
In miniseries and movies for television, Duvall has played the World War II titans Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Now, he's adding another war figure to his library of roles - one of history's ogres, Adolf Eichmann.
In ``The Man Who Captured Eichmann,'' airing at 8 p.m. Sunday on TNT, Duvall gives a chilling performance as a tender family man who loved his own young son but had no problem putting other children on trains headed for the crematoriums of Auschwitz.
An SS colonel who escaped to Argentina, Eichmann was the architect of the ``Final Solution,'' the shipment of Jews to the death camps of the Holocaust.
In 1960, Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents and spirited to Israel, where he was tried for crimes against humanity and executed two years later.
The story of Eichmann's capture holds a solemn timeliness in a year in which Erich Priebke, an SS officer who participated in a massacre of Italian civilians, was largely absolved of criminal responsibility by an Italian court.
Like Priebke, Eichmann was taken in chains from Argentina. Unlike Priebke, Eichmann was hanged for his contribution to the ugliest deeds of our time.
``He kept his work totally on an administrative level,'' Duvall said. ``He justified that he was just a member of the state, following the order of the state, so that it became abstract.''
Eichmann never considered his work evil, Duvall said. He claimed instead to be a machine-like instrument of policy.
Duvall, perhaps best-known for his work in ``The Godfather,'' ``Apocalypse Now'' and his Oscar turn in ``Tender Mercies,'' said he always is looking for a character ``that he can bring something to.'' He had wanted to play the German industrialist who saved Jews in the film version of ``Schindler's List,'' a role that earned Liam Neeson an Academy Award nomination.
History and movies march on, and Duvall came across the book ``Eichmann in My Hands,'' an account of Eichmann's capture by Peter Malkin, one of the Mossad agents who grabbed the SS man off the street in a Buenos Aires slum.
Duvall, who also served as executive producer of the movie, decided to make Eichmann's story with his own company for TNT.
Known as a meticulous researcher, Duvall sought out older residents of the German community in Buenos Aires to study mannerisms and speech patterns.
Director William A. Graham said Duvall actually met with a man who worked for the Nazi fugitive and asked what he looked like. Co-producer Rob Carliner said the Argentine man told the actor, ``Begging your pardon, sir, he looked like you.''
True enough. Even without heavy makeup, Duvall achieves one of his eerie, chameleon-like transformations; he completely resembles the murderous bureaucrat who personified ``the banality of evil.''
Filmed on location in Buenos Aires, the emotional core of the film is a series of encounters between Eichmann and Malkin, the Mossad captor, played with quiet intensity by actor Arliss Howard.
The script was written by Lionel Chetwynd, whose credits are heavy with film history projects like ``The Hanoi Hilton'' and TNT's ``Kissinger and Nixon.''
Over the holidays last year, Duvall visited with Malkin. He said the former Israeli agent found himself reluctantly drawn into a dialogue with Eichmann while the fugitive was hidden in a Mossad safe house.
``Malkin said it was like sitting on an airplane, together on a long ride,'' Duvall recounted. ``It was that kind of intimacy.''
In one of history's ironies, Malkin found Eichmann to be a more amiable personality than one of the Mossad agents he worked with. But it was that very amiability that enabled Eichmann to first win the confidence of his victims, then send them to their deaths.
For Duvall, the opportunity to make the film becomes a way to reach a bigger audience with a story that is part real-life spy thriller and part compelling contemporary history.
``You reach millions on television,'' he said. ``In a strange way, you can reach more people than you can in a feature film.''
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Robert Duvall (front) and Arliss Howard star in theby CNBTNT movie ``The Man Who Captured Eichmann.'' color. 2. Adolf
Eichmann was tried for his crimes in 1960 and executed two years
later.