Nutshell: In Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitch talks about this interesting idea he had for a movie -- a professional spy, man of action type, is going to parachute behind enemy lines. Onboard the plane is a little guy -- not a man of action -- who gives him his final briefing. But the plane shifts when the spy jumps out, and the little guy falls out, too. Now both professional spy (who speaks the local language) and the little bureaucrat who gave him his final briefing are stuck together behind enemy lines -- and every time some enemy soldier asks the bureaucrat a question -- he doesn't understand the language and the spy has to help him. And every time there’s an action scene, the spy has to save and protect the bureaucrat. The spy can’t just dump the guy, because the bureaucrat technically outranks him. The bureaucrat becomes a big problem for the spy on his mission. Okay, what the heck does this have to do with Torn Curtain?Here’s the trailer: 

 

Torn Curtain is about a top nuclear scientist, played by Paul Newman, who attends a conference in Denmark with his fiancee, Julie Andrews. She thinks he may be up to something strange -- perhaps having an affair -- and she starts to follow him. When Newman defects to Russia, Andrews follows ... and now Newman is stuck behind the iron curtain with her ... protecting her and trying to keep her from discovering exactly what he is up to. Is he cheating on her with the enemy? Nope -- he's actually faked his defection in order to find and rescue another top scientist from behind enemy lines. So he ends up kind of like that spy stuck with the bureaucrat from Hitch's pitch -- except she's his fiance as well. Newman must fulfill his mission and make sure the woman he loves doesn't get killed in the process. Experiment: No big story experiment in this film.

 

Hitch Appearance: In a hotel lobby with a baby on his lap ... Here it is on YouTube: 

 

Great Scenes: One of the greatest Hitchcock scenes is in this not-great movie -- the murder of Gromek. Hitchcock thought movies make murder too easy -- casual almost. When someone was killed on screen back then, they’d get shot, clutch their chest, and fall over dead. Since it was the 1960s, there was some blood ... but not much. But even if you think about films today, the hero sprays a bunch of bad guys with machine gun fire, there’s a blood squib, then they all fall over dead. It’s over in a second or two. That makes it look easy, and Hitchcock wanted to show how difficult it was to kill a man. This scene is intense, scary, messy, and makes the typical movie scene where the good guy kills the bad guy into a long and frightening experience.Paul Newman’s scientist is followed to his contact in the underground’s farm by East German Agent Gromek, and must prevent him from calling the police and having them all arrested. With a taxi driver waiting just outside te farmhouse, this must be a silent fight -- they can’t use a gun and they can’t let Gromek use his gun. Newman knocks the gun from Gromek’s hand, the farmer’s wife grabs it, realizes it will make noise ... and grabs a huge knife instead. But when she stabs Gromek, the blade breaks off inside him, and he’s still grappling with Newman. She hits him repeatedly with a shovel, and eventually he goes down ... but he’s still very much alive. As Newman catches his breath, Gromek moves to his feet, opens the window to call for the Taxi Driver. Newman and the farmer’s wife, pull him away from the window and slam it closed ... and Gromek proceeds to strangle Newman! This guy just won’t die! Eventually the farmer’s wife turns on the gas oven without lighting it, and they drag the fighting Gromek to the open oven door, stick his head inside ... then have to hold him seemingly forever until he finally succumbs. 

 

There is also an overlong sequence on a bus trying to escape from East Germany that has a few tense moments. The bus is a fake, identical to the real bus, and filled with fake passengers, running 10 minutes ahead of the real bus. The problem is, the police are all over the place looking for Newman and Andrews by this time, and they are stopped and searched. Tension builds as the police check everyone’s papers, and we know Newman’s and Andrew’s papers are forged. After that bandits rob the bus ... and the police decide to give the bus an escort! Now the police are with them the whole time, and the real bus is catching up to them! Some tension here ... but the scene goes on four times longer than it should.

 

Other scenes -- an escape from a facility surrounded by police, an escape from the ballet -- surrounded by police, an escape from a boat -- surrounded by police ... and for those of you who are fans of Top Secret!, the bookstore scene! It’s always fun to see the exact scene parodied in a ZAZ film, and Torn Curtain has that scene. Torn Curtain is too long, not enough real suspense, and seems to have the scenes in the wrong acts -- it doesn’t build to and ending as much as peter out to an end. Both Paul Newman and Julie Andrews seem way too low-key to make this work. Newman was a Method actor, who gives a quiet and realistic performance without any trace of personality ... and Hitchcock relied on the personality of the actors to carry the characters. Working in the old studio system, where they cultivated exciting larger than life stars like Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, he seemed to struggle in the new gritty version of Hollywood. This film was made a couple of years after Cary Grant starred in the best of the Hitchcock imitations, Charade directed by Stanley Donen, and the same year Donen directed another Hitchcock homage Arabesque starring Gregory Peck in a story very similar to Torn Curtain. Though this is not Hitchcock’s best film by a long shot, it does have an interesting idea and is much better than Topaz.

 

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William C. Martell has written 19 produced films for cable and video, including three HBO World Premieres, a pair of Showtime films, the thriller Hard Evidence (Warner Bros.), and the family film Invisible Mom. He is the author of The Secrets of Action Screenwriting and can be reached at Scriptsecrets.net. A version of this post appeared on Scriptsecrets.net.  

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