Even Hitchcock Can Suck

Hitch, you bastard! You told me we were watching Shadow of a Doubt!

I wrote this awhile ago and I haven't seen this movie since, nor have the will to. Strangers on a Train is on TCM tonight so you'll get to see my thought of a good Hitchcock movie in the near-future - in theory, anyway. Still, pre-written reviews are a good way to pad the blog out, don't you think?

Torn Curtain is perhaps the lowest point in Hitchcock’s oeuvre (at least of the 21 or so seen by me). After the James Bond films began to rip off his own spy flicks (North By Northwest in particular), Hitchcock decided to respond by making realistic looks at espionage as a counterpoint to Bond’s escapism. The result is not pretty. By draining all fantasy out of the spy film, Hitchcock succeeds in making a film that is very realistic. After all, real life is often dull, banal, and excruciatingly boring. Looking at it that way, Torn Curtain is an unequivocal success. That doesn’t make it entertaining.

The movie’s staggeringly inventive plot involves Paul Newman (RIP) as an American physicist who surprises his assistant (Julie Andrews) during a trip in Sweden by defecting to East Germany. It turns out that Newman is working on a super-duper-secret-covert mission for the CIA to gain information about Soviet missile programs. Hijinks ensue as Newman and Andrews go about their mission in a rather inept way, using the reluctant assistance of a network of anti-Communist agents to escape the authorities.

The word which comes to mind repeatedly is dull. By dull, I mean excruciatingly dull. Painfully dull. Mind-numblingly dull. Pencil at the end of an SAT dull. Kenneth Branaugh Hamlet dull. John Kerry dull. The movie is so boring and dry, it’s impossible to generate any interest in the story or characters. This results from several factors: Hitch’s competent but lazy direction, a ridiculously slow pace, way too much exposition, a cast that seems disinterested in their cardboard characters, and a number of lame sequences.

It’s a reasonable idea to make a “real” spy film which lacks the fantasy trappings of James Bond or Jason Bourne; many of John Le Carre’s novels have been successfully adapted into films and miniseries (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came in From the Cold; The Tailor of Panama), not to mention Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal and The ODESSA File. But those films have well-drawn characters and interesting stories. Torn Curtain has neither. The idea has potential, but it’s so cliché that it needs a degree of inventiveness and flare to make it work.

Here’s the biggest problem: too much exposition. I didn’t go into this film expecting Paul Newman to be blowing away dozens of Commies at a time or escaping a cackling Donald Pleasance with the aide of Q’s latest gadget. But the movie consists of nothing but endless talking scenes which give us background, but surprisingly do little to advance the story. They’re so busy talking about what Newman is doing and why, that we don‘t really care about how he does it - which is what generates interest. Characters are introduced but none are developed in any way. I’m all for dialogue when it’s well-done or has a point. Torn Curtain’s screenplay fails both tests.

The movie has one outstanding sequence, which has (for good reason) been written about by pretty much anyone commenting on the film. Attempting to reach a contact, Newman is tracked to a farm by his East German handler. Along with the farmer’s wife, Newman engages in a brutal hand-to-hand fight with the hulking policeman, who survives being stabbed and beaten with fists and shovels before ending up gassed in an oven. It is a brilliantly executed scene, and it’s the one instance where Hitchcock’s style meshes with the dry “realism” purportedly being provided by the film.

Aside from that glimmer of brilliance, Torn Curtain is completely dead. Scenes which should be suspenseful fizzle out and die. Hitchcock kills off the film’s one interesting character halfway through. Key scenes, like Newman’s blackboard duel with a German scientist, are overlong and tedious; even Hitchcock can’t make swapping Math equations interesting. Alternately, Newman’s intense grilling by East German authorities is ended almost before it begins. (For that matter, Newman is a rather inept spy, but hey, he is a professor.) Every potential for suspense or interest is short-circuited or bungled, and thus we remain detached viewers.

But Hitch saves the worst for last, in an unbelievably tedious and long final third. In what should be a suspenseful denouement, with our protagonists fleeing East German authorities, we get a ridiculously drawn-out trip through unconvincing sets and back-drop projections. They get on a bus and ride through the countryside, enduring whining passengers and periodic stops by the police. They briefly link up with an annoying Polish baroness. They chat with a CIA guy. And they escape a crowded theater as police close in on them. This is done without any flare or evident interest by Hitchcock, and instead of building suspense, we get forty-five minutes of stuff happening. And the viewer only looks at his watch, praying the movie will end soon. (It’s also not a good sign when a two-hour movie seems like four.)

Needless to say, our talented leads seem completely at a loss to account for their presence in this film. Newman’s character is inherently uninteresting and he barely expresses an emotion of any kind. Andrews fares slightly better, but not much, generating a few flickers of emotion but no chemistry with Newman. The supporting cast is completely unremarkable, consisting as they do of lightly drawn pencil sketches played by unknown actors.

Overall, Torn Curtain is an utter failure. My rating is generous, because I find it very hard to find anything positive about it. The biggest lesson learned from this movie is that even Hitchcock can make utter shit - a lesson that would be reinforced by The Trouble With Harry and The Paradine Case. But as deadeningly dull as both of those movies are, at least they aren't the festering corpse that is Torn Curtain.

Rating: 4/10 - For Hitchcock purists and masochists only