Hitchcock Collection: Torn Curtain

I wish I didn’t have to shoot the picture. When I’ve gone through the script and created the picture on paper, for me the creative job is done and the rest is just a bore Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain isn’t just a bad film, it’s a bewilderingly bad film. On paper, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why it should fail. Hitchcock is going back to familiar territory, the spy chase thriller, and adding two of the biggest stars of the 1960s into the mix. Everything should be set for an enjoyable adventure movie, a kind of European North By Northwest. But somewhere along the line, everything went wrong. Hitchcock quarrelled with his writer and his composer and made it clear to his stars that he didn’t want to be doing the picture. The stars, both miscast, became increasingly miserable and the result remains a strong candidate for Hitchcock’s worst film, considerably less interesting (in my admittedly minority view) than the generally despised Topaz and lacking the entertaining overplaying by the supporting cast that just about saves The Paradine Case. Amidst the mediocrity, one brilliant and brutal sequence alone brings the film to life. The rest would have been a horrible disappointment from most directors. From Hitchcock, it almost feels like a betrayal.

One of the biggest problems with Torn Curtain is the script. It’s little more than a string of familiar Hitchcockian situations which are only very loosely tied together. This can largely be ascribed to the fact that the credited writer Brian Moore found his ideas thrown aside by the director while they were preparing a treatment and was eventually released from the project while British writers Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall were hired to do a rewrite. The film simply doesn’t hang together on any level. The plot concerns the then-topical issue of scientists defecting from West to East and vice-versa. Michael Armstrong (Newman) is a physicist who appears to defect to Eastern Europe, much to the dismay of his partner Sarah (Andrews). It transpires that he is a counterspy who intends to pick the brains of a brilliant Communist scientist and trick out of him information on an anti-missile defence system to take back to the USA. Needless to say, his intentions are discovered and he and Sarah are forced to escape before some very nasty Communist agents can catch them. This is little more than a frame upon which Hitchcock can hang some of his favourite touches. We get the significant use of isolated sound from Blackmail; the rabble-rousing in order to effect an escape from a crowded location that was done so much better in North By Northwest; the eccentric genius with vital information in his head from The 39 Steps; the dance where vital information os shared from Saboteur; the manipulation of a woman by her lover for reasons of national security from Notorious; the silent reconciliation of man and woman from The Man Who Knew Too Much. Even the general drift of the story is over-familiar. Once again, a situation of safe normality is turned upside down and while this has led to many great Hitchcock films, here the spark of imagination is sorely lacking.

Had all this been done with a light touch then it might have just about passed muster. But Hitchcock seems to have lost his sense of humour. The kind of scenes which were played for a tightrope combination of thrills and comedy in The 39 Steps of North By Northwest are here staged so slowly and acted in such an earnest manner by Newman and Andrews that it becomes hard to keep your attention on the film. The set-up of the plot is mind-numbingly tedious and Sarah Armstrong takes such a ludicrously long time to work out what’s going on that she begins to seem a little backward – an impression which doesn’t sit well with Julie Andrews’ usual impression of a particularly irksome games mistress from a school for the daughters of gentle folk. Paul Newman underplays and gets by reasonably well but he clearly isn’t happy in the role of a brilliant scientist and his feeling during shooting that “we had a loser on our hands with this picture” communicates itself all too clearly. The only actors who manage to defeat the script are Lila Kedrova as the flamboyant Countess Luchinska, Wolfgang Kieling as the bodyguard Gromek and Ludwig Donath as the brilliant Professor Lindt. Kedrova goes wildly over the top but her extravagance creates its own comic momentum and she’s fun to watch. Kieling brings surprising depth of character to a part which probably didn’t read particularly well on the page. Donath has a fine sense of character and seems to be tuning into some private madhouse in his head. When Donath is on screen with Paul Newman, it’s the older man you watch because he’s not burdened by being the star player. Newman seems to want to shrink into the background and you can’t blame him.

To be fair, in one or two scenes, Hitchcock rouses himself and the results are more impressive than they might otherwise be due to the dull context in which they appear. The sequence in the Museum of East Berlin uses a hackneyed concept – the only sound being the footsteps – but it’s done with a little touch of brio and an interesting sense of space. The scene with the Countess has Kedrova’s dedicated hamming which Hitchcock clearly enjoys as he encourages her in her quest to find ever more ways to soar over the top. Then there is the one moment where Hitchcock undeniably asserts himself and creates an immortal moment of horror. This occurs when Newman, with the assistance of a peasant woman, has to kill Gromek. It’s an extraordinary scene in which Hitchcock asserts, definitively, just how hard it is to kill a human being. Gromek simply doesn’t want to die and stabbing and beating prove not to be enough so, eventually, the exhausted killers drag him to an oven in order to gas him. This is brutal, horrible and absolutely riveting; certainly one of the great Hitchcock murder scenes. The problem is that once it’s over, nothing else in the film begins to match it and the dreariness of the rest of the film is thrown into relief. However, this is just enough to make Torn Curtain essential viewing for Hitchcock fans.

There’s precious little else of interest. Torn Curtain looks ugly, shot with little imaginative flair by John F. Warren whose lighting is peculiarly lacking in any sense of tension or atmosphere. He seems to have been a Universal staff cinematographer who approached every project in the same uninspired, workmanlike manner. He’s certainly no replacement for the genius of Robert Burks. Much the same goes for Bud Hoffman, the editor who made his debut with Torn Curtain and subsequently worked mostly in TV. When you think of George Tomasini’s elegant cuts, his instinctive rapport with Hitchcock, you can hardly credit that the director would put up with this kind of plodding mediocrity. I’m tempted to ascribe the quality of the Gromek murder scene to Hitchcock showing particular interest in it rather than any particular interventions from the crew. The film contains the same sort of shoddy background paintings that nearly ruined Marnie and Hein Heckroth’s production design is so pedestrian that it’s hard to believe that he performed the same job, brilliantly, for Powell and Pressburger on The Red Shoes, Gone To Earth and Tales of Hoffman. The film was shot on the Universal backlot and it looks like it. It cost seven times as much as Psycho and looks about a seventh as good.

But what puts the tin lid on things is the score by John Addison. He has proved himself a capable composer elsewhere – notably on Sleuth - but his work here is just awful; a collection of Cold War clichés mingled with bizarrely upbeat jaunty music which often doesn’t fit with what’s happening on screen. To be generous to Addison, he only had a month to write the entire score and had no significant working relationship with Hitchcock. This was all due to the rift between Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann which began when Universal indicated that they wanted a potential chart-topping single from the soundtrack and, preferably, an upbeat tone throughout to avoid the film seeming too grim. Hitchcock seems to have agreed, in the hope that a project he had no interest in might salvage some commercial success even if artistic success was slipping away. When he heard Herrmann’s score, he apparently went ballistic and – when Herrmann responded in the same way – the collaboration was abruptly ended. The DVD gives us a chance to see some scenes with Bernard Herrmann’s proposed music and while it’s not Herrmann’s best work, it’s a lot better than what we get from Addison.

I can appreciate the attempts by sincere and well-intentioned Hitchcock fans to try and rehabilitate Torn Curtain’s reputation. But I’m really not convinced. It’s a tired and lazy rag-bag of half-digested ideas which has only a couple of performances and two or three good scenes to recommend it. Without the cold brilliance of the Gromek murder, it would be grotesquely disappointing. As it is, it’s just a rather sad failure enlivened by a single scene of crystal-clear malice.

The Disc

Torn Curtain looks pretty good on this R1 disc from the Masterpiece Collection. The anamorphic 1.85:1 transfer sees the film coming up good as new. Colours are rich and striking, there is plenty of detail and only a miniscule amount of obvious print damage. The quality of this picture makes Torn Curtain look a good deal better than it deserves. If I had to be critical, there is sometimes a slight excess of grain but it’s nicer to see this than to have to suffer the excessive filtering that we sometimes get. The mono soundtrack is excellent, rather too good when it comes to John Addison’s score which I never want to hear again, even when it sounds as crisp as it does here.

The extra features are unimpressive. My favourite feature is the 15 minutes of clips from the film synched to Herrmann’s music score. Otherwise, Laurent Bouzereau’s documentary Torn Curtain Rising is a tedious plod through the making of the film which doesn’t tell you anything of any great interest and steers away from much of the sheer negativity which apparently blighted the set from day one. There’s a theatrical trailer, which looks horrible and demonstrates how good the film itself appears, and some token photographs and production notes.

The film has optional subtitles – some scenes are deliberately not translated into English for plot reasons – as does the documentary.

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