A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966)

Julie Andrews and Paul Newman in Torn Curtain
Michael Armstrong: Paul Newman
Sarah Sherman: Julie Andrews
Countess Kuchinska: Lila Kedrova
Heinrich Gerhard: Hansjörg Felmy
Ballerina: Tamara Toumanova
Gustav Lindt: Ludwig Donath
Hermann Gromek: Wolfgang Kieling
Jacobi: David Opatoshu
Dr. Koska: Gisela Fisher
Farmer: Mort Mills
Farmer's Wife: Carolyn Conwell

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Brian Moore
Cinematography: John F. Warren
Production design: Hein Heckroth

I saw Torn Curtain in the year of its initial release and was never tempted to watch it again until last night. I had forgotten almost everything about it except its general dullness and the one great scene when Armstrong and the farmer's wife take an extraordinary time (for a movie at least) to kill Gromek. It's an exceptionally well-directed scene, harrowing in its unexpected realism in the midst of a film that's anything but realistic. I particularly like the way the struggle leaves Armstrong exhausted when it's over, a refreshing change from the usual movie action in which the protagonist picks himself up and dusts himself off after a fight as if it was no big deal. There is one other thing that struck me when I first saw Torn Curtain: the way Michael and Sarah supposedly blend in with the crowds in East Germany. I had lived in Germany for almost a year several years earlier, and I know how easy it is to spot American haircuts and clothes, like the kind Paul Newman and Julie Andrews have in the movie, so their going unnoticed on a bus full of Germans struck me as silly movie fakery. But almost everything about Torn Curtain feels fake. Andrews and Newman are miscast, apparently having been foisted on Hitchcock by the studio, Universal. Granted, Andrews's role is a particularly thankless one, the stand-by-your-man helpmeet, but it's particularly unfortunate in the context of a film by a director who had traditionally given women strong leading roles. And despite an opening scene that puts the two of them in bed, there is no sexual chemistry between Andrews and Newman. (Was there ever sexual chemistry between Andrews and a leading man? Is that a consequence of having been introduced to movie audiences as a nanny and a novice in a convent?) The one interesting performance in the movie is Lila Kedrova's Polish countess, trying to get Michael and Sarah to sponsor her immigration to the United States, but it goes on much too long, as if Hitchcock knew what a drag the rest of the film was and wanted to showcase this florid eccentric. This was the first film Hitchcock made without the team of cinematographer Robert Burks, composer Bernard Herrmann, and film editor George Tomasini, who had seen him through most of the glories of his 1950s and early '60s classics.