‘Eichmann’: Capture of Nazi War Criminal

As often as television repeats itself, one movie every 17 years about Israelis capturing Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina is hardly excessive.

So there’s good reason to watch Sunday’s new TNT movie, “The Man Who Captured Eichmann,” a nicely crafted work starring Robert Duvall as the architect of the genocidal “final solution” that doomed millions of Nazi victims during World War II and traumatized millions more. Duvall and Stan Margulies are the executive producers.

Based on “Eichmann in My Hands” by Peter Malkin and Harry Stein, Lionel Chetwynd’s teleplay follows the general contours of “The House on Garibaldi Street,” ABC’s 1979 film whose slow pulse lowered the resonance of this prominent post-Holocaust footnote to a monotone.

Although not the thriller that it might have been, TNT’s account is much zestier than ABC’s, viewing Eichmann and the “banality of evil” that author Hannah Arendt said he represented largely through the prism of Malkin, well played here by Arliss Howard.

Malkin was one of the Israeli Mossad agents dispatched to Buenos Aires in 1960 to determine if factory worker Ricardo Klement, who resided with his wife and family in a poor section of the city, was actually Eichmann. He was.

What follows here is Eichmann’s abduction in an evening downpour, when he’s nearly tackled by Malkin, then hustled into a car and held in a safe house for weeks while his captors question him and plan how they will spirit him to Israel from Argentina.

You’d like to think that viewers are aware of Eichmann’s background, and of his trial in Israel and execution in 1962. Those who aren’t, however, will not learn here the extent of his crimes that makes him such a prize for Israel and the object of hatred by the Mossad agents who snatch him.

Moreover, unexplained is why they press him so hard to sign a statement saying he is leaving Argentina willingly if they plan to sneak him out. And on a nit-picky level, facts don’t appear to square with Malkin’s insistence that Klement is Eichmann because of “the way he walks, like a soldier.” Malkin would have known that Eichmann had no military pedigree and instead was an SS bureaucrat who, in effect, did his killing by signing papers at a desk.

In fact, it’s Eichmann’s very ordinariness that so stuns Malkin, who, expecting a monster, instead comes face to face with a bland, unremarkable curiosity who expresses no dislike of Jews and appears to be “asking for admiration for doing his job.” This clash between reality and expectations is the film’s core that makes it worthwhile.

* “The Man Who Captured Eichmann” airs at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. Sunday on TNT.