The Odessa File (1974) on Netflix
In 1963 Hamburg, reporter Peter Miller gets the diary of Salomon Tauber, a Jewish survivor who has killed himself. It names Eduard Roschmann, the SS captain who commanded the Riga camp.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.0/1013,659 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Hamburg in 1963, Peter Miller works as a freelance reporter. Salomon Tauber, an elderly Jewish man, takes his own life, and Peter obtains the diary he left behind. The diary describes Tauber's time at the Riga camp during the war and names Eduard Roschmann, the SS captain who commanded it. Tauber had seen Roschmann in Hamburg three weeks earlier. Peter sets out to find Roschmann, and the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal tells him about ODESSA, a secret network of former SS men.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Odessa File (1974)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film premiered at the 1974 San Francisco International Film Festival, where the American Nazi Party staged a protest outside the theater, but it was mistaken for a promotion of the film.
- The film's title song "Christmas Dream", written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, was sung by Perry Como and the London Boy Singers and heard as diegetic music over a car radio during the main titles of the film.
- Maximilian Schell and Maria Schell both star in the film alongside Jon Voight and Mary Tamm, and it was the only film that the Schell siblings ever made together.
- Producer John Woolf came to the project having just made a successful film from another novel by Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal.
- Simon Wiesenthal served as a technical advisor for the production of The Odessa File.
