← Back to Reviews
in
#310 - Torn Curtain
Alfred Hitchcock, 1966
An American scientist publicly defects to the Soviet Union during a trip to East Germany as part of a top-secret spy mission.
It seems like Psycho marked the point at which Hitchcock reached a high-water mark as far as the quality of his films went and everything he made afterwards (with the possible exception of The Birds) marked a massive downturn in quality from his classic works. Or maybe I just never liked his work that much in the first place. In any case, Torn Curtain is a pretty hard film to defend because it really is quite a slog by Hitchcock standards. The premise sounds interesting - an American scientist (Paul Newman) and his girlfriend (Julie Andrews) end up on the other side of the Iron Curtain because Newman is part of a mission to discover a formula that could turn the tide of the Cold War. Of course, Andrews is unaware of the implications and insists on following Newman every step of the way, which does get complicated as Newman himself gets drawn further into the espionage than he intends to.
The problem is that Torn Curtain just doesn't deliver much in the way of consistent thrills. Sure, there's a pair of pretty charisma machines in the form of Newman and Andrews, but they don't have much in the way of chemistry together and they don't really sell the kind of attraction to one another that might jeopardise such an important mission. There are some decent sequences, such as an East German agent tracking Newman to a remote farmhouse and getting into a prolonged fight to the death as a result, but they are spread too far apart over a lengthy running time and only serve to point out how the bulk of the film barely offers anything in the way of consistent suspense. As a result, Torn Curtain really does feel like the work of a director who is spinning his creative wheels and can only just back up the rest of the film with the occasional well-executed scene.
Alfred Hitchcock, 1966
An American scientist publicly defects to the Soviet Union during a trip to East Germany as part of a top-secret spy mission.
It seems like Psycho marked the point at which Hitchcock reached a high-water mark as far as the quality of his films went and everything he made afterwards (with the possible exception of The Birds) marked a massive downturn in quality from his classic works. Or maybe I just never liked his work that much in the first place. In any case, Torn Curtain is a pretty hard film to defend because it really is quite a slog by Hitchcock standards. The premise sounds interesting - an American scientist (Paul Newman) and his girlfriend (Julie Andrews) end up on the other side of the Iron Curtain because Newman is part of a mission to discover a formula that could turn the tide of the Cold War. Of course, Andrews is unaware of the implications and insists on following Newman every step of the way, which does get complicated as Newman himself gets drawn further into the espionage than he intends to.
The problem is that Torn Curtain just doesn't deliver much in the way of consistent thrills. Sure, there's a pair of pretty charisma machines in the form of Newman and Andrews, but they don't have much in the way of chemistry together and they don't really sell the kind of attraction to one another that might jeopardise such an important mission. There are some decent sequences, such as an East German agent tracking Newman to a remote farmhouse and getting into a prolonged fight to the death as a result, but they are spread too far apart over a lengthy running time and only serve to point out how the bulk of the film barely offers anything in the way of consistent suspense. As a result, Torn Curtain really does feel like the work of a director who is spinning his creative wheels and can only just back up the rest of the film with the occasional well-executed scene.