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the audience applauded

Just perfect...

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

I like Julie Andrews. I don't like her character in this film. She is portrayed as the stereotypical female of the fifties and sixties who can't keep her nose out of things. She is asked to do some things on faith, and off she goes to defy a simple request. She is constantly in the way in tense situations. But the plot is pretty good and while not a work of art, there is good tension and suspense. Of course, the East Germans are about as helpless as they can be, missing opportunities to put an end to Newman's activities. It is hard to tell who the good guys are sometimes. I have to say that the scene at the farmhouse is classic and shows how hard it is to kill someone without the aid of a gun. It seems endless as Newman and the woman do everything they can and are barely able to escape. By the way, do we ever get to know what happens to her or where she went. I'm hoping this fictional character was able to take off after burying the evidence. The final scenes are somewhat stock (the theatre thing was done already). Anyway, it's a really fun romp with signature actors.

Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) is a physicist and Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews) is his assistant/fiancée. The government had rejected his work on an anti-missile defense. They're in Norway for a conference. He tells her that he's going to Stockholm but she finds out that he's actually going to East Berlin. She follows him there. To her shock, he declares that he is defecting to the east once they arrived.Alfred Hitchcock had already achieved greatness when this movie opened. The problem with this movie is that it fails to reach the same heights. This is a rather bland unoriginal espionage movie. It feels like a script from the maybe pile. The dialogue has no sting. There is no shock value. I never bought Armstrong's defection. The long kill of the East German Stasi agent is pretty good but it still lacks realism. It's a run-of-the-mill thriller from somebody who should have done better.

I knew this moment would come, and that I'd eventually find a Hitchcock film that I didn't care for too much. TORN CURTAIN, while certainly topical in its examination of Cold War politics, nuclear secrets and double agents, largely fails to do what every other Hitchcock picture I've seen so far has done, i.e., be entertaining. Granted, there are a few sequences that recall classic Hitch, but they are barely enough to distract from how dull this was to get through at times. In what would be his last usage of "marquee" talent, Paul Newman and Julie Andrews star as a couple of scientists who publicly defect to East Germany at the height of the Cold War in order to gain access to an important formula or nuclear secret. Honestly, as the film's MacGuffin, this piece of information doesn't really matter (to the audience, at least). And that's fine. However, matters aren't helped by having such weak characters despite being capably played such talented actors and Newman and Andrews. Even the chemistry between them was barely better than Connery and Hedren in MARNIE. There was also no memorable villain. Still, at the risk of beating down too much on the film, there were a few sequences that I will probably remember for while. The best of these happens close to halfway in, and involves a tense brawl between Newman and an East German agent who has gotten onto his secret plans. It plays out sans score, and was incredibly tense. Towards the end, there was also a bus-riding sequence and a scene in a theater that recalled the climax to THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. It wasn't as good as the former, but still stood out. If there's one thing that's sorely missed, it's Bernard Herrmann as composer, here replaced by John Addison. I did like a number of the cues, but I can only imagine that Herrmann's score would have been much better. Even so, I liked the jazz-inflected touch that Addison brought to the material. Ultimately, though, TORN CURTAIN suffers by having terrible pacing and taking too long to really kick into gear. The last 40-45 minutes, minus a pointless semi-comic detour, is able to salvage some of what came before, but the film is still overall kind of boring.

Take two outstanding stars; add a handful of top notch character actors; a celebrated director, and you should have a first rate film. Instead, you have wooden performances by Newman and Andrews. Add to it backgrounds that are so unrealistic looking that they are obviously Hollywood stages with artificial lighting and uncreative photography.Worst of all is the plot. The so-called excitement or tension predominantly arises from an unbelievably stupid slip-up by Newman. He draws the mathematical symbol for Pi in the sand of a farmhouse to indicate to a non-English speaking German woman the purpose of his visit. She then introduces him to his contact, but he doesn't erase the symbol with his foot, which any idiot would do, no less a supposedly brilliant scientist.As a result, the East German surveillance bad guy sees the symbol, so he has to be bumped off, and all the subsequent chases derive from this single piece of Newman's stupidity. I would have thought that a film late in Hitchcock's career would have had more substance, and from all standpoints, been creatively better. I skimmed through parts of it, since the dialogue was pretty uninspired and there wasn't much to miss.