by Jill Vranken, Staff Writer

On paper, 1966’s Torn Curtain looks like a solid premise. A tense Cold War spy thriller, helmed by the most famous director in Hollywood, and boasting one of Hollywood’s hottest leading men (who, at the time, already had three Best Actor Oscar nominations under his belt)? It sounds like a recipe for success.

In practice, Alfred Hitchcock’s fiftieth film is both a curious anomaly in Paul Newman’s career (a year later he would properly cement himself as an icon in Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke) and the beginning of the end for its director. But what made this pairing and its creative result such a mismatch?

US physicist and rocket scientist Michael Armstrong (Newman) is on his way to a conference in Denmark with his assistant/fiancée Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews). While on the ferry, Armstrong receives a radiogram asking him to pick up a book at a specific bookshop in Copenhagen, with the additional message to “contact π in case of emergency.” Sherman’s suspicions are raised when Armstrong tells her he is traveling on without her to Stockholm. Sherman discovers that her fiancé is lying to her, and is actually travelling to East Berlin. Following him, she, to her horror, discovers that Armstrong has seemingly defected to East Germany.

The truth, however, is more complicated: Armstrong’s defection is a ruse, with the goal being to gain the trust of the East German scientific establishment so that Armstrong can deduce how much their chief scientist (played by Ludwig Donath)–and by extension, the Soviet Union- knows about anti-missile systems. He has made preparations to return to the West via the π escape network, but things soon get knotty for both Armstrong and Sherman as they try to make it out alive.

Inspired by the real-life defection of two British diplomats to the Soviet Union, Hitchcock originally wanted Julie Andrews’s character to be the focus of the movie. But friction with script writer Brian Moore and a resistance to change, coupled with Hitch’s intense eye for detail (he hired British authors Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall to polish up the script and then hit them with notes such as “we should eliminate the floor concierge, as my information is that they do not have these in East Berlin” which, calm down, mate) provided a less than ideal canvas to start from. Couple this with a rushed production and continuing issues with script satisfaction, and you get a strangely sloppy and languid movie.

Newman–who, along with Andrews, was famously pushed onto Hitchcock by Universal Pictures’ studio exec Lew Wasserman–and Hitch did not get along, to put it mildly. Newman’s Method acting background and continuous queries for Hitch regarding his character’s motivation were a source of great irritation. Newman later insisted he meant no harm, and was quoted as saying he reckoned they could have gotten along if the script hadn’t gotten in the way.

Hitchcock seems to drop the ball on a number of occasions, either not playing with the tensions inherent in the basic story and instead letting sequences either drag on (the scene of Armstrong trying to goad Professor Lindt into revealing his anti-missile equations plays out as just two men writing stuff on a blackboard for an eternity) or not going deeper on the things that are of interest. For example: late in the story we are suddenly introduced to the exiled Polish Countess Kuczynska (Lila Kedrova), who provides a crucial bit of aid to Armstrong and Sherman (she seeks visa sponsorship in return) when she helps them escape after being spotted. It’s easily one of the movie’s most interesting sequences, and it only lasts for ten minutes before the Countess is never seen again. Which is a shame, given that Hitchcock and Kedrova apparently became good friends on set, and he went to great lengths to keep her scenes in the film during the edit.

The supposed love story between Armstrong and Sherman is also hampered, mainly by a complete lack of chemistry and a surprising disinterest from Hitch, given that he was originally looking to have this story from Sherman’s point of view. Newman and Andrews both try their best, but from the minute we meet our two leads (tangled in bed, late for breakfast), there is a distinct lack of chemistry between them. You never quite believe that Sherman would willingly defect to the Soviet Union for Armstrong, nor do you believe that she would be willing to assist him once she is made aware of the actual plan going on.

Why not scrap the love story? Why not make the Countess’s story a bigger focus, for example, and let her be a complication? Why are you, instead of arguing with your leading man, not working with him to make this…well, work?

For all its faults, I’d be remiss in not highlighting the two sequences in Torn Curtain which actually do work. The first is the climactic escape during the ballet. The second, and arguably the best, is the death of Wolfgang Kieling’s security officer Gromek, who figures out Armstrong’s game and tries to report him to the police. What results is a brutal, lengthy fight in which Armstrong and the wife of his contact in East Berlin struggle to take Gromek down. Hitchcock included the scene to show the audience how difficult it can be to kill a man, given that some spy thrillers at the time (.... *cough* James Bond *cough*) made it look easy.

It’s by far the most Hitchcock sequence in the movie, and it’s a damn shame that things panned out the way they did because you get the distinct sense that, if Newman and Hitchcock had perhaps worked together years earlier (and of their own volition, rather than due to studio interference) they could have made something beautiful and brutal together.

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