under cover
by
Douglas Messerli
Brian
Moore (screenplay, revised by Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse), Alfred
Hitchcock (director) Torn Curtain / 1966
It is difficult to ascertain why Hitchcock’s Torn
Curtain is not a great movie. Clearly it is not as tightly written nor as
clever or sardonic as Rear Window or North by Northwest. Both
Universal Studios and Hitchcock were generally displeased with Brian Moore’s
original screenplay, which they saw as too dour, and called in the writing team
of Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse to fix it. So too was Hitchcock displeased
with the original score by his trusted composer, Bernard Herrmann, and called
for a new score by John Addison. Addison’s music, with its driving, pulsing
force, is quite satisfactory, if not as broodily romantic as Herrmann’s
previous contributions.
Because
of actor Julie Andrew’s busy schedule, Hitchcock was forced to shoot the film
at a much faster pace than he wanted. Perhaps more time would have taken some
of the kinks out of the movie. But it is also clear that throughout the
shooting the director had become somewhat disinterested.
Hitchcock
turned his camera, instead, on his minor actors, eliciting wonderfully
eccentric portraits from Lila Kedrova as the Countess Kuchinska, desperate to
find an American sponsor to get her out of the country, Tamara Toumanova as the
mean and vengeful Ballerina, Wolfgang Kieling as the
vernacular-English-spouting Stasi Thug, Hermann Gromek, Ludwig Donath’s
exasperated Professor Gustav Lindt, and the nearly speechless Carolyn Conwell
as the Farmer’s wife. Despite their star-statuses, Newman and Andrews became
mere mannequins surrounded by such fine character actors. For his leads,
Hitchcock might as well have used puppets, despite Newman’s and Andrews’
physical attractiveness.
Beyond
these obvious problems, however, there are several absolutely brilliant
episodes in the film, certainly better than anything in his previous
psychologically hackneyed film Marnie.
Yet
there are dozens of other scenes almost as exhilarating. Kedrova’s near-mad
devouring of the couple as she seeks their help, and her intense cries of
“Bitte, Bitte” at post office minions are, once again, both agonizing and
funny, creating a kind of intense pathos that reveals her aging desperateness.
The
scene with Armstrong and Lindt, wherein the German physicist is gradually drawn
through his pride and intellectual loneliness into a web where he
unintentionally betrays his country, all played out against the clock as
Armstrong is poised to escape, is absolutely breathtaking.
Underneath, under cover so to speak, Torn Curtain, accordingly,
contains a whole series of shorts that are well worth watching, even if, by
film’s end, we are faced again with only the two dripping, wet leads, who have
escaped to Sweden by diving from the East German boat. Although they may live
happily ever after, the film has not. But as one critic commented, if Hitchcock
had made no other films, we might find Torn Curtain a pretty good work
of its day.
Los
Angeles, April 17, 2014
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (April
2014).
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