How do you play a man who has done inhuman things on an unbelievable scale as anything other than a monster?
If you're Robert Duvall and you're playing the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann, you try to see Eichmann from Eichmann's point of view."You just do as much research as you can," Duvall said in an interview with TV critics. "Then you follow what the script writer gives you and you have to operate from the base that he doesn't perceive himself as evil. From his point of view, he's just a man who has done a job and done it successfully."
That job that Eichmann did very successfully, of course, was transporting some 7 million people - including some 6 million Jews - to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. As a member of the dreaded SS and the head of the Office for Jewish Emigration, he became an expert at prying Jews loose from occupied territories and sending them to the gas chambers.
Eichmann escaped capture at the end of the World War II, eventually settling in Argentina - where he remained until captured by members of the Israeli security service, the Mossad, in 1960.
TNT's "The Man Who Captured Eichmann" (Sunday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m.) recounts the tale of the capture. And Duvall's outstanding per-formance brings this incredibly average, incredibly evil man to life.
"You can't play evil, you just play the facts, really," said Duvall, who added that he tried "to find the contradictions . . . not play a predictable villain, just play specifically the facts and the moment-to-moment behavior."
Duvall, who's also an executive producer of the movie, had an excellent first-hand source of information on Eichmann - Peter Malkin, the man who actually did capture him and is the author of the extremely readable book "Eichmann in My Hands" on which the movie is based.
A fascinating, engaging man, Malkin (played in the movie by Arliss Howard) had very personal reasons for wanting to get his hands on Eichmann. His sister and her family - as well as numerous other members of his extended family - were swept up by the Nazis in Poland and sent to their deaths.
"I was very careful when I was writing the book," Malkin said. "I never mentioned the word `monster.' Why? I knew if I said `monster' he has the right to do all the evil. A monster can do everything.
"But the question, really, that haunted me when I caught him and held him there and held his mother - the first question that came to me that changed a little bit of my life was: How is it that a man like me and you has done these atrocities?
"That is the question. It's not a monster, it's a human being. Eichmann, (Dr. Josef) Mengele, the others - they were all human beings. The question is, how did it happen that a human becomes an Eichmann?"
In both the movie and Malkin's book, the capture of Eichmann plays out in the first half of the movie. Then Malkin and other members of the Mossad hold him hostage in Argentina until they can spirit him out of the country.
During his Buenos Aires captivity, Malkin got to know Eichmann as the two conversed. Know him, but not understand him.
"I didn't have to talk to him, but it was imposssible not to talk to him during the 10 days," Malkin said. "I knew that all my family was killed and now I sit beside this man that is on the bed and I knew he did it."
Eichmann insisted repeatedly that he was only following orders - that he, personally, had not killed anyone. He even insisted that he liked the Jews and had nothing against them.
"I listened to this . . . and I said, `Oh, it's a joke. Or he wants to make like him,' " Malkin said. "No. He believed that he loved Jews and that the only reason he did it was because his country called him as a soldier to do this task. And he did it the best he could."
Try as he might, Malkin could not penetrate the mystery of the man - or understand "the banality of evil."
"That's my problem - I still don't understand him," he said. "I questioned him, and he answered me, and it's like he had a wall of glass between me and him.
"We're talking and he doesn't understand me. I said, `For an order, you killed mellions of people and millions of children?' And he answered me, `That was right what I've done. Was good for Germany. I followed the Fuhrer's orders.'
"I don't understand the man and I don't understand Germany - why they accepted what these people have done."
And many have wondered how Malkin could resist the urge to kill Eichmann himself. He admits that, at one point, he was sorely tempted - Eichmann began singing Hebrew prayers.
"It came in my mind - this is the time really to strangle him," Malkin said. "This is the best time. . . . But there's no revenge for millions of people dead."
Neither the script nor Duvall's portrayal attempts to excuse or even adequately explain Eichmann. What emerges from "The Man Who Captured Eichmann" is an unexplainable paradox - a man who obviously loves and cares for his family - particularly his young son - but who engineered the murder of millions.
It's the unexplainable "banality of evil" once again.
"I'm a professional actor so I'm called on to do a job," Duvall said. "And it's fun to portray such a character, if I may say so, even though he is a man with heinous proportions. But it's a job. You try to prepare yourself as you can."
And, in addition to Markin, Duvall talked with a number of other people who knew Eichmann during the years he was hiding in Argentina. (The movie filmed in Argentina - including at a house just around the corner from where Eichmann lived.)
"When he was captured, and when he was tried and hanged, it was said that it went from mouth to mouth in Argentina that Adolf Eichmann wished that at the time of his death he could become Jewish so that yet one more Jew would die," Duvall said. "That's astonishing."