At the centre of the conflict that informs Torn Curtain – Alfred Hitchcock’s fiftieth feature film – is a Cold War-based anti-ballistic missile defence system that will sound familiar to those who have followed U.S. defence policy. Paul Newman plays Michael Armstrong, a young and ambitious physicist who, apparently frustrated at Washington’s unwillingness to pour mega-dollars into an iffy proposition, decides to defect. Armstrong (the incorrigible optimist) suggests that if he shares his knowledge with East German colleagues, together they could develop a system of defence that would make nuclear war obsolete.
But of course, in Hitchcock’s world things are never quite what they seem, and soon we learn that Armstrong may be engaged in some dangerous double-dealing. Complicating matters is Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews), Armstrong’s tenacious fiancé, who refuses to take ‘get lost’ for an answer, and sticks to him like stink on a wet dog. Theirs is supposed to be a red-hot relationship, but the aloof Newman and schoolmarm-ish Andrews are two of the coldest screen personalities of their time; you’ll find more heat in a meat locker. If the unconvincing romantic angle had been jettisoned, the film would have been, while still a lesser Hitchcock, more sharply focused.
The plot revolves around Armstrong’s efforts as a spy, and his intriguing encounters with the East German political and scientific leaders. Their scepticism provokes them to assign Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling), a cagey East German agent, to shadow the American. Gromek has spent significant time in America and is hip to the scene, engaging in some of the film’s most entertaining banter with Armstrong. The most memorable and startling moments come when Armstrong tries to ditch his shadow during a prolonged and eerily quiet chase through an East Berlin museum, a passage filled with vividly and threateningly militant iconography. Once Gromek catches up to Armstrong and uncovers his duplicity, we endure a tortuously unpleasant murder scene as Armstrong and a hardy peasant lass beat, stab, pummel and finally asphyxiate the unexpectedly empathetic communist agent. Murder, says Hitchcock, ain’t pretty.
From there, the film devolves into a rather mundane chase movie as Armstrong and Sherman are flung around East Berlin in a series of mildly diverting adventures. It probably doesn’t help that Hitchcock reminds us of some of his better films within the context of this flawed effort. The supposedly fiery and distrust-filled relationship between Armstrong and Sherman is a modern version of the far more convincing Grant- Bergman coupling in Notorious. In the movie’s penultimate scene, set in a crowded theatre, we have Hitch riffing on his two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, where at a pivotal moment Armstrong, instead of simply screaming, yells “fire.”
Burdened with a pair of cold and distant lead performances, this film is unable to survive the loss of its most interesting supporting character at the film’s halfway point. Torn Curtain begins as a promising political thriller, but winds up as a slightly disappointing effort, a minor chord in the master’s cinematic concerto.
