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Andrew Sarris Loved 'Torn Curtain'(Review Excerpts)

posted 16 years ago by ecarle
3 replies | jump to latest

"Torn Curtain" has a bad reputation in the Hitchcock canon, but I have found a 1966 review of the movie by the esteemed Andrew Sarris(in a review-collection book entitled "Confessions of a Cultist 1955-1969), and it turns out he liked it a lot and wrote his review accordingly.

Two things, though: (1) He thought "Torn Curtain" was better than "Marnie," which(in a 1964 review in the same collection where I found this "Torn Curtain" review), he found a "failure." So there's an argument.

AND

(2) All through Sarris' review, he calls this movie: "The Torn Curtain." Its a jarring mistake and it reminds us: sometimes putting "The" in a title is WRONG.

Anyway, some excerpts:

"This ultracommercial package of Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, Hitchcock himself and a spy subject is doing boffo business around the country even though the reviews have been mixed to mildly unfavorable, and there is a general feeling that Newman and Andrews are wasted in routine roles..."

"We are already many degrees Farenheit away from the world of James Bond, where no one ever sweats or shivers. HItchocck has taken us from fire to ice, and in the process he has denoted a fundamental disorder in the world he has created."

"...there is a classic one-take sequence in a hotel room that would inspire rapturous essays for its meaningful use of color if only it had popped up in an Antonioni film."

"...Julie Andrews is emotionally released by elaborate camera movements all the more expressive because Hitchcock is too adept at montage to require camera movement for merely mechanical assignments. HItchcock's economy of expression makes him infinitely superior to such non-montage directors as Kubrick and Fellini, whose camera movements often degenerate from gratuitiousness to monotony from sheer overwork."

"Newman...endanger(s) friendly agents and innocent bystanders...he is simply a conniving petty bureaucrat out to steal a trade secret from the enemy, in this case the East Germans, but it could just as easily be a rival company. Newman is the Organization Man par excellance, using unscrupulous ends to achieve dubious ends, and Julie Andrews is the perfect company wife, smug, superior, and supremely confident that enough money can compensate for anything. That Newman, particualrly, is anti-typecast makes Hitchcock's statement on Americans of the sixties come over more forcefully..."

"(The murder of Gromek) is the only murder in the movie, and it constitutes Hitchcock's comment on the Bond casualness about killing, and perhaps also on the perversion of a genre that Hitchcock and Fritz Lang so often transcended with their noble art."

So there.

"

[–] rexshard93 16 years ago

I won't say Torn Curtain has a bad reputation on Hitchcock canon. It has some bad points. It also has some good points. In almost every Hitchcock film, there is an interesting character. In Torn Curtain, We see the character "Gromek." He is an interesting character Hitchcock was very happy with Wolfgang Kieling's performance, because Kieling played it effectively. All of the scenes with Wolfgang Kieling are brilliant.

Even in a less known Hitchcock film, there is an interesting character.

[–] nosnojsirhc 16 years ago

sonysunu - ecarle, in saying TC has a bad rep in the canon, isn't asking if you like it. he's saying it's less famous/popular. true. people usually haven't seen it, if they are casual admirers of hitchcock, and if they have, and aren't film buffs or hitchcock fans, they think it sucks. if they are hitch fans or film buffs, only then do they sometimes cite it as a good film. i happen to think it's pretty good. and it's clear that people have been influenced by it - see the work of David Lynch, for example. Fire Walk With Me quotes from the bus scene. however, ecarle's right - it's not considered a highlight of the Hitchcock canon by most people.

glad you like Gromek, by the way - a sympathetic communist villian during the cold war!!! imagine it. there are lots of other good qualities in the film.

it's true that the leads got sidelined - but i think that's hitch's desire to mess with convention - he recognizes the need to often use big stars to get people in to the theater, but he also wants to focus on his camera work and telling his stories that way - not on performances. so he uses the big names but doesn't really do anything much with them. we see him moving into a different element - euro actors - for his next film, topaz. they are, one assumes, much more comfortable with this type of direction.

anyway, back to the OP - do you think Marnie's better? i almost feel as if marnie and torn curtain rotate in the same orbit, around his better works - nearby, just not in the inner circle.

[–] ecarle 15 years ago

I'm coming back WAY late to respond...sorry, didn't see it...but "Marnie" and "Torn Curtain" are interestingly adjacent among the "late Hitchcocks," and I've always been surprised to see "Marnie" considered to be a much better movie than "Torn Curtain."

I think that they are about even...with the edge to "Marnie" for having a Bernard Herrmann score("Torn Curtain," from which Herrmann was fired, has a middling-to-awful John Addison score.)

Personally, I'm with Andrew Sarris. I like "Torn Curtain" more. "Marnie" finds Hitchcock "begging for an Oscar," what with a lot of Tenneesse Williams' Southern over-actin' on the part of the principals, and a rather too-much "reveal" of Marnie's dark secret. Everybody except Sean Connery is hysterical in that finale(the facial acting of mother and young daughter in the flashback is laughable to me), and, while I realize that Marnie's childhood secret IS horrible...seeing it revealed with such emotional overdo is not my cup of tea.

With "Torn Curtain," Hitchcock returns to a cooler tone, and a rather serious look at what "spying" really involves: using other people, killing other people.
Gromek and his death scene are great, but to me, the "cool" unsung scene in the picture is the "chalkboard duel" during which Newman tricks Professor Lindt out of the secret. This scene is witty, suspenseful, brilliantly edited and shot -- Hitchcock at his very best. I love how Newman closing in on the formula(we see it in his face as he realizes "that's it!") is counterpointed with the loudspeaker announcement that he must be found and captured for the Gromek murder. A "dual suspense mechanism."

"Torn Curtain" goes flat at times -- the otherwise brilliant bus sequence is foiled by how Newman and Andrews just SIT there -- but it is, on the whole, a more intelligent and involving Hitchcock picture for me than "Marnie."

Still, by then, the great Hitchcock work was over.

I think maybe "Torn Curtain" was just one Mount Rushmore climax away from greatness, maybe.