William Goldman's concept of a mystery story is one in which the audience hasn't the foggiest notion what's going on. The eventual elucidation doesn't really put everything in place, but simply throws a blanket of approval over the many senseless outbursts of murder and mayhem. Along the way, though, the audience knows for certain that it is witnessing a Helen MacInnes-type thriller. It knows this by the abundant clichés: the uniform gray-day lighting; the omnipresence of silent Hitchcock-ian henchmen shadowing the main characters; the stereotyped Nazi war criminal sequestered in South America in a room decorated with human skulls; the James Bond gimmickry of a bomb in a baby carriage and a push-button sword that shoots out of a coat sleeve; and the inhuman interrogation and torture that take place in an abandoned warehouse (the particular nature of this torture will no doubt discourage a number of customers from their annual dental checkups). Dustin Hoffman, playing a college track man as in his Graduate debut, begins the movie in Andy Hardy cuteness and ends it in Mike Hammer ruthlessness; and in between those extremes he has a few credible moments of faint-hearted frenzy. John Schlesinger, directing his most irredeemably commercial project to date, conjures up some fleeting feelings of paranoid edginess, but he is unable to bring any conviction to the zap-pow comic-book stuff. One of the wackiest ideas in this loose-screw movie is the suggestion that mid-Manhattan is teeming with Jews who survived WWII concentration camps and who look as gray and gaunt as if they were freed only yesterday from Dachau. With Laurence Olivier, William Devane, Roy Scheider, and Marthe Keller. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd