In discussions about my upcoming plans to rank all of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, I’ve mentioned the number “forty” several times, but that’s because I am simply not that interested in his non-thriller films. Even among those that theoretically count as thrillers as a secondary genre, like the comedy The Trouble With Harry and the period piece melodrama Under Capricorn, those have turned out to be the ones that I like least of all. There are about a dozen inarguably non-thrillers that Hitch directed, mostly in his early career, and as such, the 1966 release of Torn Curtain was a landmark, as it was the director’s fiftieth film. Ultimately, it was one that really only pleased the studio due to its financial success, as contemporary audiences and critics as well as the stars and the director himself weren’t terribly pleased with it.
Torn Curtain opens aboard a passenger ship experiencing heating problems while traversing the European fjords, bearing several dozen scientists to Copenhagen for a physics conference. At lunch, two people are conspicuously absent: Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and his assistant and fiancée, Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews), as they are canoodling together in his cabin, where they make pillow talk about his recent departure from D.C. following the ending of funding for an anti-missile program in which he was involved. Armstrong receives a radiogram that he conspicuously denies is for him, only to later retrieve it from the ship’s radio room. There, he runs into East German physicist Gerhard (Hansjörg Felmy), who was expecting to have a lunch date with Sarah. Upon arrival in Denmark, Sarah takes it upon herself to retrieve a book that is being held for Armstrong at a nearby shop, and Gerhard tags along. Later, alone, Armstrong decodes a passage in the book that directs him to make contact with someone or something calling themself Pi (as in π). Growing more suspicious as to why Armstrong tried to keep her from joining him on this trip, Sarah watches as he retrieves a ticket from a concierge that he claims is for a quick side trip to Stockholm. When she learns that he is actually going to East Berlin, she follows him and boards the same plane, arriving alongside him behind the Iron Curtain just in time to watch him publicly defect to the Soviet Union.
Hitchcock’s espionage thrillers in the lead up to (Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes), during (Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Lifeboat), and immediately following (Notorious) WWII are all explicitly political. For the most part, his Cold War era spy features, of which there are only four, are not. The Stewart/Day version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which was the first espionage thriller since Notorious a decade earlier, foregoes any real inspection of the foreign “other” that made the Peter Lorre version a much more exciting film. Other than a line from Leo G. Carroll’s professor character in North by Northwest in which he tells Cary Grant, “War is hell, Mr. Thornhill, even when it’s a cold one,” the film is politically vague. Hitch’s output in the back half of his career shows that he wasn’t terribly interested in cloak-and-dagger flicks anymore, and cared even less about politicizing them; if anything, one could argue that the “spying on one’s neighbor” politics of Rear Window are more politically conscious than his two 1950s espionage pictures. That changed in the 60s. By 1965, Eon Productions had released four James Bond films: Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball, and all of them had been inspired in some way by North by Northwest. With a fifth Bond on the horizon, Hitchcock took two attempts at making his own version: 1966’s Torn Curtain and Topaz, the latter of which would premiere in 1967, the same year as You Only Live Twice.
Topaz is fine, if a little overlong, and it’s more clearly evocative of the Bond format; the main character is a career spy, has a lot of gadgets, and has sexual encounters with morally dubious women on both sides. Torn Curtain is a better film because it adheres more closely to Hitchcock’s strengths: strong character work, an “everyman” protagonist, an appropriate level of comic relief, the occasional breathtakingly gorgeous shot composition, and multiple scenes of excellent tension. Unfortunately, it also features some of the director’s late-career shortcomings, notably some lazy shortcuts with some visuals. The most unconvincing is a scene in Copenhagen where Armstrong and Sarah are at an outdoor cafe where he behaves like a total ass in an attempt to get her to stop following him (and thus avoid potentially being trapped in East Germany for the rest of her life). Inexplicably, the sequence is shot not on location or even on a soundstage, but with Andrews and Newman sitting across from each other at a table while the street, the restaurant, and the other patrons are rear-projected behind them.
To its credit, however, it also uses some of Hitch’s ideas from his other end-of-career films in the best possible way. I’ve fretted quite a lot about what the gratuitous, provocative, mean-spirited sexpolitick and violence of Frenzy (and to a lesser extent, Marnie) might imply about the man’s entire filmography, but this film perfectly combines the cheekiness of the underplayed sexuality in North by Northwest with the more liberal attitude toward sex (and violence) that Frenzy had. While the censor boards prevented him from showing Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint climbing into bed together at the end of Northwest despite them explicitly being married by that point, this film opens with Newman and Andrews under the sheets (and a pile of coats) together. In the features on this film’s Blu-ray, they include and highlight an on-set production photo showing a bra lying in the open in a shot that doesn’t appear in the film, which is more suggestive than the director would have been able to get away with at an earlier point, and when Newman gets out of bed, he’s topless. In a reversal of the mainstream tendency for a film to ogle its female characters, Hitchcock also clearly understood Newman’s wide sex appeal, as he is slutting this man out. In addition to climbing out of bed with Andrews shirtless in the first scene, he’s shot head to toe in a shower in a Danish hotel with only a frosted shower curtain to leave something to the imagination, and Newman’s top comes off again in the back half in a doctor’s office to wake up anyone in the audience who might have started to zone out at that point. In contrast, although Andrews is gorgeous, the Edith Head costumes that she wears throughout are sharply tailored and fabulous, but also conservative in their coverage. (It’s also worth noting that the hairstyle she has here is not flattering; one assumes it’s her actual hair, still growing out from the short style she wore in the previous year’s The Sound of Music, but the two-toned highlights make her appear greying in a manner that ages her in such a way that you would believe it if someone told you that film and this one were a decade apart.)
The production was a mess behind the scenes. One of Hitchcock’s most famous quotes is that “Actors should be treated like cattle,” and Newman was a younger performer who had studied method performance at the Actor’s Studio. The director didn’t care for this, and is quoted as having responded to Newman’s question about what his motivation was in one scene by telling the actor “Your salary.” Hitchcock may have burned a bridge with longtime collaborator Bernard Herrmann, who composed several of his films, including Psycho and The Birds. All sources note that they “never worked together again,” but Hitch only made three more movies after this, one of them after Herrmann’s death, so it’s unclear how long-term that enmity might have been if either of them hadn’t been quite old at this point. Andrews’s sudden ascendancy to superstar meant that she was cast at the studio’s insistence, even though her brief window of availability also meant that the film had to be rushed into production despite Hitchcock not feeling that the script was ready. Of the experience, she has said that she took the opportunity because she wanted to work with the famous director, “and that’s what [she] got out of it,” since she “did not have to act in Torn Curtain. [She] merely went along for the ride.”
To be honest, all of these seams are apparent in the final product, but this is nonetheless a decently captivating motion picture, especially if you are someone familiar with Hitchcock’s work. Contemporary reviews criticized the film’s pacing, cited a disappointing second half once the twist becomes clear (especially so since, although Sarah believes Armstrong’s defection is in earnest, no one in the audience will), and criticized what they felt was an old-fashioned film. To that last point, they may not be wrong. As noted before, this was the man’s fiftieth feature, and he had been doing this for four decades; he was now in direct box office competition with two generations of directors who had been inspired by his work, while he was a 67-year-old man with only a few films left in him. Nevertheless, this might not be hitting it out of the park, but he’s still making it to second base. The most well-remembered scene finds Armstrong grappling to death with his Stasi tail, Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling), in a farmhouse kitchen when Gromek tracks the supposed defector to a farm where he finds the π symbol scratched in the dirt. This is where the looser restrictions around violence in the 1960s work better than in Frenzy. Hitchcock wanted it to be clear that killing a man is difficult work, rather than the quick and easy slayings that James Bond dished out, and so the scene lasts a long time. The academic Armstrong is no match for the man, and it takes help from a farmer’s wife to take Gromek down, in a fight that involves a knife, a shovel, and a pot of cabbage soup.
It’s excellent stuff, but the sequence that stood out the most to me was one in which Armstrong and Sarah are escorted onto a bus full of other members of the secret π organization. The bus is a decoy that runs ten minutes ahead of schedule of the real bus that goes from Leipzig to East Berlin, and everyone aboard is a member of the resistance. It’s fantastically tense, as the audience first experiences relief when it seems like Sarah and Armstrong are finally en route to the next step in their homeward journey, then anxiety when they meet the first police barricade, then relief when they pass, then suspense when they encounter a second barricade, only to find that they now have to deal with army deserters who act as highwaymen. It’s a great ride. Once they get to East Berlin, they also find themselves assisted by a Polish expat, Countess Kuczynska (Lila Kedrova), who hopes to escape to America with their help, and she adds a lot of heart to the film. Despite her late arrival, she’s third billed, and it’s well deserved.
Time has not been kind to Torn Curtain, but its categorization as a lesser Hitchcock is largely undeserved. It doesn’t reach the director’s heights, but it’s also much more engaging and exciting than its reputation would indicate.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
