It’s interesting exploring the titles in a director’s career that don’t get as much celebration, particularly the later period films by a marketed auteur like Alfred Hitchcock. I remember mainly reading about Torn Curtain (1966) from a book about Paul Newman my Mum owned and in Scorsese On Scorsese where the farmhouse sequence is cited as an influence by Scorsese on the violence in the Cape Fear remake. With Hitchcock’s stated desire to show that murdering someone wasn’t a quick, simple business, the farmhouse sequence is a masterful, visceral piece of cinema, which no doubt is the birthplace for decades of grotesquely extended screen violence. The casting of Paul Newman and Julie Andrews was apparently forced on Hitch by the studios, so it is interesting to see how they work (or don’t work) in the Hitchcock hero and heroine roles. Newman is intense and compelling, and seemingly more sexualised by the camera in moments than Andrews who fares worse with an underwritten character; as many have noted, there’s not much chemistry between them. A Cold War era spy thriller that follows physicist Newman’s plans to obtain a formula from a scientist in East Berlin, “behind the Iron Curtain”, there are great suspense sequences and spy movie cliches. Terrific costumes by Edith Head. Bernard Herrman is missed (he was apparently fired and it ended his working relationship with Hitchcock). Slightly too long and while not firing on all cylinders like North By Northwest for example, I still had a good time and was entertained by Torn Curtain, screened on Blu-Ray from a Hitchock box set. Recommended.
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