Topaz as a hilarious farce?

I'm thinking through this thread, and I suppose my reaction is to the phrasing of "hilarious farce."

Idea One being that "Topaz" is "so bad that it must have been INTENDED as a hilarious farce."

Idea Two being that "of course, Hitchcock made hilarious farces." (And you then named some of Hitchcock's comedic thrillers.)

Let's tackle Idea Two first: Hitchcock certainly believed that humor was an element of his films. He felt that "I Confess" and "The Wrong Man" lacked humor, and that hurt them at the box office.

Many of Hitchcock's movies are so filled with one-liners that they qualify (at one level only) as "comedies": The Trouble With Harry, To Catch A Thief, North by Northwest, Family Plot. But even those four films have their share of suspense and death: Harry IS dead, murders and/or kidnappings occur in the other films.

"Frenzy" veers -- rather shockingly -- from extremely funny comedy scenes (the Inspector suffers his wife's horrible cooking) to the most disturbing scene Hitchcock ever put on film (the lingering rape and slow strangulation of a woman by a man.)

"Psycho" is shocking and its heroine dies a brutal death, but the film is played with tongue-in-cheek and many funny lines.

So I guess this is another way of saying -- yes, most Hitchocck films have humor. And "Topaz" is no exception.

Like this exchange between Andre and the "florist spy" Dubois

Dubois: Shall I infiltrate as a reporter from "Ebony" or "Playboy"?
Andre: Ebony.
Dubois: I would prefer Playboy.
Andre: Ebony!
Dubois: Man, are you square!

But I cannot believe that Hitchcock meant "Topaz" to be a funny film in its ultimate effect. The final montage is of all the people who died or were tortured to effect the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Hitchcock films: comedies, yes. Hilarious farces. Very rarely. Scenes maybe (the wrong Ambrose Chapel in "Man Who Knew Too Much '56, perhaps?)

One really gets the sense that AH had not much reserved, at the end of the day, in the way of respect toward humans - that we somehow fritter away our potential. He's playing. I think a deep study of his films (which I have always liked, by the way) and how he made them shows the work of a near sociopath. Brilliant, disengaged, observant, acutely aware of detail and presentation... and the pathos in his films is largely there to manipulate - he was a master at conducting his audience, just as he conducted his cameras and his actors. For these reasons, it might *feel* difficult to discern between 'camp', 'farce', 'comedy', 'thriller' in movies that get so nitty-gritty into the details of espionage, murder, rape... however, all of those elements are there. It's just disturbing to think that those elements may have been the fuel for AH's engines - that behind the tweaking of suspense and careful modulation of set pieces between high drama and lowbrow humor, AH was enjoying making a running set of little injokes at the expense of, well, basically, the entire world. We shouldn't feel too disturbed, however - he just did it well. Much of our entertainment tries - but rarely attains - in the same vein. We are fooling ourselves if we try to pretend that AH - or any one of us, for that matter - can't understand any single event, no matter how brutal, shocking, or heartwrenchingly tragic - from another point of view. What's freaky to me is that, despite all the humor and camp I see in Topaz, it seems to be, in what was a highly humorless and UN-campy era (the cold war), to feel pretty real. Think about it too much, analyze it, and one gets creeped out. AH has an oddly insidious effect on the mind.