Watch Topaz For Free

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

It's a shame because there is a great story in there. Some strange decisions were made in the direction of the film.

After directing his works of mountain peaks 10 years earlier with "Vertigo" (1958) over "North by Northwest" (1959) to the crowning all independent produced "Psycho" (1960), Alfred Hitchcock overthrew himself with the fast-tracked adaptation of Leon Uris' Spy Game Thriller "Topaz", telling the story of a french spy, who unravels the schemes of the 1962 Cuba Crisis by exposing french governmental bureaucrats exchanging Russian Intel towards atomic missile logistics in the Caribbean triangle.Director Alfred Hitchcock challenged himself with the second after "Torn Curtain" starring Paul Newman in 1966er espionage story, which had been about an American scientist, who defects back and forth to the East and back to East Germany again, carrying a secret formula, which may change the fronts of the emerging cold war. With "Topaz", the director seemingly wanted to make up for an mediocre hardly suspenseful result of "Torn Curtain", which he felt to be a cinematic failure.Nevertheless provided with less budget production then for "Torn Curtain" of just 4 Million U.S. Dollar and no Hollywood Star in the picture to back him up, Alfred Hitchcock encounters the years towards the end of his career existing Universal Studios distribution deal, before he delivers the infamous line over the phone of his Universal Studio office on July 20th 1978 to Hollywood executive Hilton Green, "I can't go on.", concluding his career with a fairly received crime-comedy genre mix "Family Plot" (1976)."Topaz" became a project under pressure towards tight deadlines and against the success of novel. The picture misses the playful ease of Alfred Hitchcock's films as "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943) or "To Catch a Thief" (1955). The director had the clearly over-rushed novel adaptation to a screenplay by Samuel Taylor, under control, but Alfred Hitchcock did not managed to bring the film's action up to a contemporary pace with an already gone spy action movie hype of the 1960s and six over-achieving 007 movies produced and successfully distributed by independent production company Danjaq, LLC between 1962 to 1969.In "Topaz", Alfred Hitchcock resided in rigid structure of wide to close up dolly camera movements as well as inter-cutting, which had been working all through his career to an defining signature that shaped suspense-triggering-films to this day. The editorial as the cinematographic technique works occasionally as in the scene of killing the character of Juanita de Cordoba, played by Karin Dor, through invading Cuban Military, in a high angle shot of capturing beauty on the fading in green-silk wrapped body sliding to the Villa's foyer floor after receiving an up-close and personal gun shot by the haunting character of Rico Parra, portrayed by actor John Vernon.Another momentum of cinematic significance can be witnessed with the too-late introduced characters of french bureaucracy giving faces by actors Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret, who both find death after their public exposure of spying for the Russians in one of two after the previously mentioned interior Cuban Villa Scene, where suspense had been all round up by Director Alfred Hitchcock with combining the spoken word with contradicting action beats in a interviewing scene of Noiret's character of Henri Jarre.The third moment of joyful Hitchcockian mastery presents itself in the final scene regarding the character of Jacques Granville, in manner of a professional actor performed role by Michel Piccoli, where a one shot uses the camera on a crane from close-ups to wide and back to the Piccoli's pitch perfect close-up, revealing Jacques Granville's exclusion from society, underlined by an immense baroque conference hall setting.No doubt that these flickering scene of mastery can not prevent "Topaz" to be another failure of a Hollywood movie with an charming but unappealing, if not to say passive leading character of Andre Devereaux, performed by miscast actor Frederick Stafford, which Alfred Hitchcock could not get to one single break-out beat of struggle, despair nor fighting spirit towards the will to survive a life-threatening situation.Realising his battle against windmills with two failing spy movies, Alfred Hitchcock returned to his crime-menacing thriller roots with "Frenzy", which he presented at Cannes Film Festival on May 19th 1972 to another recalling success of a director, who shaped editorial techniques as well as cinematographic movements in 50 years of film-making like no other to create the diligent and unremitting instrument of suspense in cinema for any genre from timeless comedies over classic drama to high-end contemporary action movies.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Enterainments LLC)

This film should have been titled Torpor. Hitchcock, who in his best films was interested in plot merely as a means to guide the audience from sequence to sequence, here presented a film that is entirely plot — there isn't any memorable sequence and little in the way of engaging performances. The two films that Hitchcock directed prior to this — Marnie and Torn Curtain — at least had striking sequences that generated suspense and excitement. In the former, the riding sequence ending in the injury and killing of the horse and the sequence of Marnie stealing money from the Rutland firm; in the latter, the murder of the agent in the farmhouse and the panic in the theater, to name a few examples.The relatively weak box office performances of those films put Hitchcock in the position of needing a hit. Hitchcock thought that a story about recent international spycraft would do the trick, even though Torn Curtain, which had a similar basis, had been tepid at the box office. Adapting the Leon Uris novel for the screen proved problematic, even though Uris was a veteran screenwriter. Hitchcock usually had a film all planned out before any production was done; filming was simply the work to put the director's vision on film. Topaz went into production without a finished script. The result is a film that moves from routine dialogue scene to routine dialogue scene without any distinctive touch. Even the death of the Karin Dor character is oddly flat in its impact. Only the supporting players, and Karin Dor, gave some hint of character. John Forsythe and Frederick Stafford seem to be caught in an ad for men's suits (Botany 500 probably). John Vernon works on the sort of accent used in the Mission Impossible series: "Jyoo weeel tell ahss the theengs jyoo haff dohn." Hitchcock seems to have been adrift here. Two of his key collaborators on the great films of the Fifties — Robert Burks on camera and George Tomasini in the editing room — were no longer available (Marnie was the last film they would work on); he couldn't get a satisfactory script. The result was a film made to fulfill a contract. Any director could have done this film. Even Don Siegel would have made it better-paced.

Hitchcock ventures into politics in this spy drama and it doesn't really work to perfection. Part of the problem is that at this stage in his life, we had such incredible expectations for his movies. Here he thrusts us into the middle of the Cuban missile crisis, creating danger for the principles involved. The whole point is to find evidence of the wrong-doing of the communists and bring it to the world. A Castro like dictator is at the center and when things go wrong it costs people their lives. I think that the shortcoming here is dealing with newsworthy issues and contemporary history. I don't know that Hitchcock ever got that specific in any of his other movies. Obviously, he has done spy dramas before but they don't get into caricatures of political leaders.