Topaz - 43 years later

I saw this film in a theater in 1969, while I was in the Navy in San Diego.

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I saw this film in a theater in 1969..in San Diego.

I wasn't in the Navy(though San Diego was and is a big Navy city), I was too young.

I am wondering if we saw "Topaz" at the same theater: The Spreckels downtown, evidently named after the Spreckels sugar family.

My family was on Christmas vacation at the time and I requested that we see "Topaz" as it wasn't playing in the city where we lived. We had to sit through another movie first called "The Last Adventure" and then, finally, my wish came true: to see the new Hitchcock movie!

To properly set the time, I will add that on that San Diego trip, a few nights after we saw "Topaz," my parents left the kids in a hotel room to go see ANOTHER movie "on their own": The R-rated "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice." A LOT different from Topaz.

I sometimes return to San Diego and occasionally go over to look at the Spreckels just for the memory of seeing Topaz there. The Spreckels is now immeidately adjacent to a big modern shopping center, and I beleive that the Spreckels only does live productions. The US Grant hotel across the street has been visited by many movie people and dignitaries, and the square nearby figured in the climax of "Its' a Mad, Mad...World."

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It struck me as an odd, arty, somewhat incomplete film. Even the music seemed somewhat inconsistant, and the pacing and ending disappointing. I'm glad we can see the complete film today which is much better. Still, the music scoring was very poor, the opening march is repeated again several times, just as filler rather than inspired cues. (Why it keeps playing after the opening credits, and the scene has changed to Copenhagen, I never understood even in 1969! No music at all would have been better. If you watch it now, turn off the volume after the titles and not on until the two other body guards get out of the car.)

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Yeah, that is weird about the music cue repeating. Perhaps Topaz had been recut so many times going into release that Maurice Jarre couldn't get a precise music track on the picture. I LIKE the opening march(which, in its first few seconds, rather mimics the Bernard Herrmann build-up for "North by Northwest" but with DRUMS) but it repeats a lot, as does the French-exotic "Topaz theme" that keeps playing all through the Cuba and Paris scenes.

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Once the scene changes to Cuba, it seems to get bogged down in too much melodrama, and overdramatics.

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A lot of "Topaz" is good, but it is bad when things get overwrought and overdramatic...scenes with Frederick Stafford, Karin Dor and Dany Robin(though Dor and Robin are certainly gorgeous). Conversely(as I've noted elsewhere) I love the entire Harlem sequence with Roscoe Lee Browne, I like the Paris stuff with the distinctive Phillipe Noiret and Michael Piccoli as plotters...and I PERSONALLY love all that "you are there" interrogation in Virginia of the Russian defector; it feels like an "inside look at defector debriefing."

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Interesting that Universal chose the "airport" ending for the full length DVD, rather than the "suicide" ending in the original theatrical release. I guess it is the only upbeat one of the three, and maybe the most believable.
Might have more..

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Though the suicide scene is "cobbled together" from other footage, I like it the best. The duel that Hitchcock preferred just doesn't work(Stafford, in accepting the duel, is voluntarily agreeing to let Piccoli, a much better shot, KILL HIM -- it simply doesn't make sense, even if Piccoli is killed first by a sniper. Stafford couldn't count on THAT happening.) The airport ending isn't particularly happy because we've had Piccoli painted as "the villain," and he gets away smiling.

All three endings are weak, but only the Piccoli suicide is satisfying...barely. IMHO.

Further irony: three years and pne film later, after "Topaz" could not find its ending, "Frenzy" has one of the best, perfect endings in all of Hitchcock.