Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)

John Vernon and Karin Dor in Topaz

Andre Devereaux: Frederick Stafford
Michael Nordstrom: John Forsythe
Nicole Devereaux: Dany Robin
Rico Parra: John Vernon
Juanita de Cordoba: Karin Dor
Jacques Granville: Michel Piccoli
Henri Jarré: Philippe Noiret
Michele Picard: Claude Jade
François Picard: Michel Subor
Boris Kusenov: Per-Axel Arosenius
Philippe Dubois: Roscoe Lee Browne

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Samuel A. Taylor
Based on the novel by Leon Uris
Cinematography: Jack Hildyard
Music: Maurice Jarre

There's one Hitchcockian touch, almost the only one, in Topaz, that's become known as "the purple dress scene": As a woman, shot at close range, collapses to the floor, the skirts of her dress spread out around her like blood. It's a striking effect, but also a distractingly showoffy one in a film that is remarkably free of other such irruptions of style. Topaz may not be the worst film Alfred Hitchcock made -- there are some strong contenders in his early silents as well as in some of his other late films -- but it's certainly one of the dullest. There are four sections that cry out for some of the Hitchcock wit to make them more tense and entertaining: In the opening sequence, we watch as a highly placed official in the KGB defects to the West, along with his wife and daughter; then the French agent Andre Devereaux is tasked with retrieving a crucial document from a Cuban officer residing in a Harlem hotel during the opening of the United Nations; next, Devereaux goes to Havana to obtain further information about Russian missiles in Cuba (the film is set in October 1962); and finally, Devereaux is charged with unmasking the high-ranking French intelligent agents, whose code name is Topaz, who are selling secrets to the Soviets. Staging all of these sequences should have been child's play to the director whose mastery of the spy thriller was well-established in such films as Notorious (1946) and North by Northwest (1959), but each of them somehow fizzles into overextended business without real suspense. Part of the problem seems to be that Hitchcock was working without a finished script: After Leon Uris's attempt to adapt his novel was rejected, Hitchcock turned at the last minute to Samuel A. Taylor, who had written the screenplay for Vertigo (1958). Whatever you may think of Vertigo, the strengths of that film are not in its screenplay, and Taylor, working under intense deadline pressure, was unable to come up with a script that successfully ties together the four big sequences of Topaz. The frustration and ennui that Hitchcock felt with the situation is palpable. The ending was reshot several times, the first time after a preview audience rejected the notion of a duel between Devereaux and the Topaz agent Henri Jarré that took place in a soccer stadium, the second after audiences were confused by a scene in which Jarré manages to escape to the Soviet Union. The final version, in which Jarré commits suicide off-screen, lands with a thud, partly because Philippe Noiret, who played Jarré, was unavailable for the filming, so that we see only the exterior of his house and hear the sound of a gunshot. More interesting stars than Frederick Stafford and John Forsythe would have helped the film, but most of the blame for the dullness of Topaz has to be given to Hitchcock.

Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. Will today's kids feel sentimental about the multiplexes in which they see movies, the way I feel about the Lyric and the Ritz in the small Mississippi town where I grew up, the places where I learned to love movies? The Ritz, built sometime in the 1930s, was the newer one, and it made a feint at elegance with some art-deco-style trimmings; the Lyric was, I was once told, originally a livery stable. The last I heard, the Ritz was derelict, and the Lyric had been converted into a venue for live music, catering to college students. So since I have my own lost cinema paradises, I should be the right audience for Cinema Paradiso, with its tribute to a bygone era of moviegoing. Tornatore's movie has some good things going on, including the performance of Philippe Noiret as Alfredo, and the wonderful rapport between Noiret and young Salvatore Cascio as Toto. Leopoldo Trieste's performance as the censorious Father Adelfio is also a delight, and ending the film with Alfredo's assemblage of the kissing scenes the priest made him excise is a masterly bit. But once Toto grows up to be the lovestruck teenager Salvatore (Marco Leonardi), I begin to lose interest, as Tornatore's screenplay lards on more and more sentimentality. I've seen it twice now, though I have yet to see the 173-minute "extended cut" of the film, in which, I am told, the grownup Salvatore (Jacques Perrin) is reunited with his teen love Elena (Agnese Nano), now grown up and played by Brigitte Fossey. Frankly, I don't much want to: The 155-minute version seems overlong as it is. Cinema Paradiso is beloved by many, and often makes lists of people's favorite foreign-language films, but I find it thin and conventional.

La Pointe Courte (Agnès Varda, 1955)

Philippe Noiret in La Pointe Courte

Lui: Philippe Noiret
Elle: Silvia Monfort

Director: Agnès Varda
Screenplay: Agnès Varda
Cinematography: Louis Soulanes, Paul Soulignac, Louis Stein
Film editing: Alain Resnais
Music: Pierre Barbaud

"They talk too much to be happy," says one of the villagers about the Parisian couple (Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort) who are spending time in a small fishing community on the Mediterranean. He has been in the town, where he was born, for several weeks, and she arrives to tell him that she wants a separation after four years of marriage. So they wander around, endlessly analyzing their relationship, as life goes on in the village: The townspeople argue with the authorities about where they can fish and about the bacterial count that has been detected in the water; a small child dies; a young man courts a girl over the objections of her father; a festival that involves jousting from boats takes place, and so on. The sophisticated self-analysis of the couple soon begins to look petty against the backdrop of the village's real problems. At one point in their dialogue, a scene is stolen from them by one of the village's many cats, whose playing around on a woodpile behind the couple becomes far more interesting than what they have to say. Aside from Noiret and Monfort, the actors are all actual residents of the village. Varda began as a still photographer, and her sense of composition is notable throughout this film, her first. She had spent time in Sète, the town where La Pointe Courte was filmed, as a teenager, and was photographing it for a friend when the idea of the movie came to her. It's often cited as one of the first films of the French New Wave, of which she became a prominent member, though seven years passed before she made her second and better-known film, Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962). Alain Resnais, who became one of the leading New Wave directors, edited La Pointe Courte, and the striking score is by Pierre Barbaud.

Masques (Claude Chabrol, 1987)

Masques shares the style (and the one-word title) of those 1960s romantic thrillers like Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963), Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966), and Kaleidoscope (Jack Smight, 1966) that inevitably got called "Hitchcockian." So it's not surprising that Chabrol, who recognized Hitchcock's genius when Hollywood still thought of him as just a popular entertainer, should cast an hommage to the director in their manner. Roland Wolf (Robin Renucci) is writing a biography of Christian Legagneur (Philippe Noiret), who hosts a cheesy TV talent/game show featuring senior citizens, so he comes to spend a week at Legagneur's estate near Paris. There he's introduced to a houseful of eccentrics: Legagneur's mute chauffeur/cook, Max (Pierre-François Dumeniaud); his secretary, Colette (Monique Chaumette); and a couple, Manu (Roger Dumas), a wine connoisseur who is helping stock Legagneur's cellar, and his wife (or perhaps mistress), who is a masseuse and reads tarot cards (Bernadette Lafont). (Lafont gets third billing after Noiret and Renucci, though hers is decided a secondary role, perhaps because she appeared in Chabrol's first film, Le Beau Serge, in 1958, and worked with him again several times during their long careers.) But most intriguing of all to Wolf is Legagneur's pretty young goddaughter, Catherine (Anne Brochet), who Wolf is told is recovering from a serious illness and is quite fragile. It's clear to the audience from Catherine's erratic behavior that she's drugged -- whether as part of her therapy or not is the question raised in Wolf's mind. For no one in this household is exactly what they seem, least of all Wolf, who, when he's alone in his room, removes a gun from his shaving kit and hides it on a shelf. On the shelf he finds a lipstick and with it, murmuring "Madeleine," he writes a large "M" on a mirror, then rubs it out. Madeleine, we will learn, is Wolf's sister, who is said to have quarreled with Catherine and then left on a trip to the Seychelles, which Wolf seriously doubts. Madeleine is also, of course, the name of the character played by Kim Novak in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), one of several "Easter eggs" for Hitchcockians left by Chabrol in the film. Legagneur's TV show, for another example, uses as theme music Gounod's "Funeral March for a Marionette," which was the theme music for Hitchcock's own TV show. Masques failed to find an American distributor when it was first released, but is now available on video. It's definitely minor Chabrol, but Noiret is terrific as the affably sinister Legagneur.