Was this a financial success back in 1966/1967???
Was it a financial success in American back when it was originally released?
"Trust Me Carrie, You Can Trust Me!"
This film was a box office failure.
shareActually it seems it was a box office hit but maybe a critical failure. The film made around $13million in the US alone and the budget was only $6million, additional money from other countries would of made it a further profit.
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Where did you get that information? I always heard that Torn Curtian was a box office failure.
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yes it is very true... the 'critics' try to make it seem that Hitch was a disaster after "PSYCHO" but "THE BIRDS" , "TORN CURTAIN" and "FRENZY" all were big hits. "TORN CURTAIN" placed on the top 10 that year ...the critics now tell it was a financial disaster it was not at all
shareTorn Curtain was universals biggest money maker of the year.
shareThe problem was a comparison of "Torn Curtain" versus the greatest hits of
Hitchcock (Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, and above all, Psycho)
Julie Andrews (Mary Poppins, and The Sound of Music, at that time the Number One grosser of all time)
Paul Newman (actually, this guy made so many damn movies in the 60's its hard to find his hits, but he had them.)
Torn Curtain came up short against those comparisons, didn't last long, and died from poor reviews and word-of-mouth.
Still: Andrews + Newman + Hitchcock in 1966 = Big Opening Weekend
Hitch went on the road to sell it, too. He did an hour long interview on a local radio station in Boston and took phone calls, and there were a ton of them. Many of the callers were amazingly knowledgeable about Hitchcock's career, one even asking him about The Lodger! Someone asked about what it was like working with Mony Clift and the old boy spoke respectfully of Munt-Gum-ry Clift and how gifted he was (that Clift had recently died may have been a factor here). A fascinting interview. I still remember it, and I was a mere fourteen years old at the time! There was an enormous ad campaign when the film came out, heralding it as Hitchcock's 50th motion picture. I sort of assumed at the time that the Hitch-Newman-Andrews combo made Torn Curtain a hit if not a blockbuster. It was only years later that I read that it had disappointing box-office. There was a whole lot of hype for that one, maybe the last time a Hitchflick got that kind of saturation advertizing-news coverage. It was treated as an "event", yet from all I've heard it didn't live up to its "promotion". I don't know who to believe. Those "by the numbers" sites are suspect in my opinion. The numbers often don't look right to me, especially for older films from the 40's and 50's. My sense is that they may be including reissues. I have my doubts. On the other hand, even if TC had healthy returns it probably cost a lot due to its very hot leading players and the fact that the studio pushed it, which in itself cost them a bundle. To my teenage eyes it had "hit" written all over it.
One thing I do know: Julie Andrews was at her peak at the time, still hot just a year after The Sound Of Music, her star wouldn't begin to seriously decline for a couple more years, when those pricey musicals tanked, one after the other. Newman was huge then, maybe the biggest male star of the period after Steve McQueen. The older postwar guys like Lancaster, Douglas, Ford and Holden were all somewhat past their primes; Jimmy Stewart had his last blockbuster, Shenandoah, the previous year and had come to seem irrelevant almost overnight; Brando was in pre-Godfather limbo; and Hoffman, Redford, Beatty, Voight, Gould, Nicholson and the "new breed" had yet to emerge as superstars or in some cases to have even appeared in a movie. So Newman was at his peak; he was Hollywood's "golden boy" of the 60's, and he still looked younger than his years. It's true that Newman was quite prolific in the 60's, seemed to have at the very least two, often three films a year back then; and he had big box-office. Yet this doesn't mean that Turn Curtain made the same kind of money as Harper, Hombre or Cool Hand Luke. But sometimes films made by top people that were supposed to make a fortune didn't, as in the case of the Ford-Wayne-Holden 1959 The Horse Soldiers. How could they miss with that one? Well, they did. The movie lost money. Nor did it hurt the careers of those involved in it. The film simply failed to take off. Newman probably had his share of pictures like that even in is prime.
Interesting about the promotion of "Torn Curtain." I've looked at materials years later, and the hype of "Hitchcock's 50th Film" had perhaps a backfire effect, as did the casting of Newman and Andrews. In 1966 Newman WAS the biggest male star of the time (McQueen needed 1968, "Thomas Crown" and "Bullitt" to pull ahead; John Wayne may have been more popular but his fan base was older), and Julie Andrews was in the biggest hit of all time. Given Hitchcock's own growing reputation (in the film academic press of the time), probably nothing less than "North by Northwest II" would have allowed "Torn Curtain" to live up to its hype.
In the sixties, Paul Newman was the beneficiary of the studios' desperation to "make new male stars" as a whole generation aged(Stewart, Fonda), retired(Grant, Cagney) or died (Gable, Cooper, Tracy). Once Newman got the heat of "The Hustler" and "Hud," EVERYBODY wanted to cast him. Newman rejected many roles and it is a salute to Hitchcock that the Master landed Newman for "Torn Curtain."
One of the reasons I like "Torn Curtain" well enough is that I very much like Paul Newman, and he's always watchable in "Torn Curtain," even when he is actively rejecting the material right before our eyes (watch his disinterest when having to talk all that plot with the spy-farmer on the tractor.)
On either side of "Torn Curtain" are two of Newman's best 60's movies -- "Harper" (as a wiseacre LA private eye, with Janet "Psycho" Leigh as his ex-wife and an all-star cast around him) and "Hombre" (as a laconic "White Indian" anti-hero, with Martin "Psycho" Balsam as a sympathetic Mexican stagecoach driver and Richard Boone as a smooth Western badman, and an all-star cast all around them.) "Torn Curtain" isn't nearly as hip as those two Newman pictures, but Newman IS hip -- and good -- in "Torn Curtain" (his best two scenes are the kitchen killing and the chalkboard duel.) He's also great to look at, which is key to a lot of stars.
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Personal childhood reminiscences: I was edging into later childhood back then, vaguely aware that this man Alfred Hitchcock was more than just a TV host; and I did read an article in the Los Angeles Times about the making of "Torn Curtain." It was a big article, a long one, and I looked at the photos of Hitchcock, Newman, and Andrews and recognized them all.
A year or so later, "Torn Curtain" came out. My family was on vacation near the beach, but we did like the movies, and we would take time away from the sun to go in a dark theater and watch them(!!). I remember the newspaper being spread out on a table to look for a movie to see, and we picked "Torn Curtain." It's the only time I remember going to a Hitchocck picture because it was "the good one available" rather than BECAUSE it was from Hitchocck. My father picked it because it was a Paul Newman movie, and we never missed those; he was a big Newman fan.
We had a toddler in the family at the time, and we split up the "Torn Curtain" viewings so that one parent could stay with the toddler and one kid while the other parent took one of the other kids. I missed the "first shift." One parent and sibling came back from the first showing of "Torn Curtain" and the report to me was was: "You probably shouldn't see this movie. There's a very violent murder scene in it."
I threw a very erudite temper tantrum. If my sibling had gotten to see that murder scene, I was entitled to, as well. All the kids would be talking about it at school (they talked about Psycho and The Birds), so why shouldn't I get to see it?
It was determined that I could see "Torn Curtain" after all, and I went on "the next shift" with the other parent. I thought the murder scene was cool. The rest of the movie bored me to tears.
Some years later, "Torn Curtain" premiered on NBC television. Two major cuts were made:
1. The opening love scene with Newman and Andrews under blankets (presumably nude, but Newman emerged in his undershorts) was cut entirely. The movie began on NBC with Newman coming down the stairs on the freezing ship.
2. The kitchen killing of Gromek was cut by about 75%. Just some struggling and a shot of the gas oven coming into view. I was disappointed: this wasn't the movie I saw in '66.
A few years later, PBS showed a special on Hitchcock as the final episode of a series on film directors called "The Men Who Made The Movies." The show covered all the Hitchcock movies through "Frenzy" -- and they showed the Gromek murder pretty much intact. Thus, almost ten years after I first saw it (and after several years of only the edited-for-television "Torn Curtain" being available for viewing), I again saw the Gromek killing it all its realistic, jagged-edge disturbing glory, with a more grown-up sensiblity about how/why Hitchcock filmed it that way.
So that was my journey with "Torn Curtain," and perhaps a reason that I like it more than somebody would who is encountering that movie for the first time today, on DVD or cable or something like that there.
It was very interesting to read your memories of "Torn Curtain", ecarle.
I loved your description of the film, with which I agree : the film bored me to tears!
What did your parents think of the film?
I don't recall my parents liking it much. When they liked a picture, they would talk about it a lot afterwards around the house...or go see it again. Nothing happened with "Torn Curtain."
But I strongly remember my father's liking of Paul Newman. We saw all his movies that came out during those years.
I personally remember liking "Harper" and "Hombre" better than "Torn Curtain" when I saw them as a kid. I didn't understand everything about them, but Newman seemed cool in both films, and there were recognizable stars (Janet Leigh, Richard Boone) in them.
telegonus-
Just rewatched TORN CURTAIN- I see it as Hitch's 'Interesting Failure'
It had its great moments - The scene with Mort Mills and, of course, that notorious murder in the farm house; never fails to get to me. You suddenly felt like you were watching a real Hitch Film.
Excellent Cinematography.
Story was far too uneven. Wonder how the original script, or the one Hitch wanted, was.
I thought that mushy kiss scene behind the bushes was unprofessionally dumb. I expected one of the agents to suddenly pop up. There goes the show. Did the studio insist on a great risky romantic moment with its big stars?
And that soundtrack didn't help.
In spite of its problems, I liked TOPAZ better.
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