A puzzling part of the film?

Yes, Elsa’s role and motives seem muddled but I agree that she would have had no difficulty in hooking the nerdish Babe whenever she wanted. That however raises fresh questions in my mind.

Why, unlike his worldly wise brother, did he have no woman in his life? Why did the Puerto Rican lads opposite think he was gay? Was the sex between Babe and Elsa mutually satisfying?

Any thoughts out there?

Based on just one viewing of the film, here are some quick thoughts on your very interesting list of questions:

Q In the library, he still would have taken her book and brought it back to her like any decent person would do?
A Are you sure Babe was that alert to other people? Isn’t it equally likely that he would have left the book out of indifference or timidity?

Q Who were the people trying to kill Doc in his hotel and who was the man watching from across the window?
A Wasn’t the old man on the balcony opposite just an innocent bystander?

Q Devane's character said something like "Doc gave safe haven to a lot of Jews in exchange for gold", so I thought for a second that he was like a hero, like Oskar Schindler. I supppose he was a bad guy?
A Wasn’t Janeway talking about Szell, an extremely bad guy?

Q Who names their kid "Doc" and "Babe"?
A I think their given names were Henry and Thomas.

Q Who was that maniacal Jewish guy who assumes that anyone speaking German is a Nazi and why did he feel the need to all of a sudden turn a New York city street into Death Race 2000?
A At a guess, did he have personal reasons dating from World War 2 for disliking Germans? Some Jews have been ready to meet violence with violence.

Q And wasn't it a bit too convenient of a plot contrivance that they would both crash into an oil truck?
A Isn’t there only a limited number of possible endings to a car chase?

Q Why would anyone care about a Columbia University grad school student at all who doesn't even know what his brother does for a living?
A Why would Doc take his apparently dumb kid brother into his confidence? Particularly since he himself and Janeway both appear to be double agents.

Q Janeway was a mole?
A He seems to be working for at least two sides?

Q What is up with Dustin Hoffman's arc? To redeem his father's suicide, he had to kill Janeway (who I'm not sure needed to be killed) and a Nazi. The people who persecuted his dad were McCarthyists.
A That puzzled me. The death of Szell in the waterworks, at his own hands not Babe’s, avenges the Nazi monster’s many victims. Old Levy, however, had felt he could not fight on and instead took his own life. Yet his enemy was not Nazism but McCarthyism and, as you may perhaps be hinting, was the mindset of McCarthyism in fact not that far from Nazism? In both, a conception of the state which not all citizens shared was used to harass an arbitrarily defined minority.

Q Also, why did Babe originally omit McCarthy from his thesis if he was obsessed with his dad's death?
A One of the best questions! Was he too hung up over the failure of his father’s life? Is it all very Oedipal, that you can’t grow into a man in your own right until you have symbolically “killed” your father and laid him to rest?

I just saw this movie for the first time, here are my thoughts on this thread...

Dustin Hoffman wasn't going to kill Janeway - they made a deal at the country house, but as Hoffman was leaving to cash in on his part of the deal (Janeway told him where Szell was), Janeway shot Ilsa (who Dustin Hoffman loved, despite her probably being Szell's mistress or at least working for Szell) and that's why Hoffman turned back and killed Janeway.

As for the car chase in the beginning, I'm not sure what clued the "maniacal Jewish guy" in to the fact that the German guy driving in front of him was a Nazi (maybe he remembered the guy from a concentration camp? I missed some of this part), but the guy WAS a Nazi, in fact he was Szell's brother and his death starts the whole plot of Szell having no one left he could trust after his brother died.

The Asian guy was a hitman hired by Szell to kill Doc. The guy across in the next building in the wheelchair was both A) an innocent bystander, and B) a reference to the Hitchcock classic film Rear Window, where a wheelchair-bound James Stewart witnesses a murder in the building window across from his.

As for the woman being hard-to-get, it's both a long con and a way to make the audience think she wasn't a plant... but it seemed like she actually fell in love with Hoffman. IMO she was lying when she said she'd never met Szell, though.

Great movie.

Who was that maniacal Jewish guy who assumes that anyone speaking German is a Nazi and why did he feel the need to all of a sudden turn a New York city street into Death Race 2000?

The old man was just someone who happened to see what was going on across the street.

Doc was too young to have been involved in WW2.

The death of Szell brother is what triggers the entire movie. It was just a case of road rage, nothing sinister, but Szell didn't know that, which is why he left his jungle compound to get the rest of the diamonds.

Doc had a cover identity as an international financier or something like that, and that's what Babe thought he did.

Janeway is a double agent.

Scyllia is Doc's code name.

His attempt to redeem his father was to be with his doctoral thesis, Janeway and Szell were revenge for Doc.

I don't remember that he was omitting McCarthy from his thesis. He was the one who discovered his father.

Gotta read the book again.

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dude, some people have lives and don't have all day to surf imdb boards to find the one post that reflects their question. why do u have to be rude? who cares??? OMG HE POSTED SOMETHING SIMILAR TO ANOTHER POST!!!! WTF!!!!! Like, who cares dude???

The point of Elsa was to be the mysterious femme-fatale. But I'm not she came of as that. To me she was just came off as cold.

I have seen the film numeral times and I still don't know exactly what she did or why. All we have is what she's telling us. And even that isn't probably entirely true cause the film clearly shows that she is an unreliable narrator. For all we know she might as well could have been Szell's mistress.
All I got from it was that she was somehow instructed to lure in Babe, to see how or if he knew. So it wasn't just a random meeting in the library..