"Topaz," lacking big stars or big action, is rather a study of how a group of interrelated people in several countries criss-cross and interact on a matter of international crisis. America, Cuba, France, and Russia are engaged in a life-or-death game in "Topaz," and a few people have to die (some gruesomely by torture) before the game is over.
As Samuel Taylor told Hitchcock, the point of Topaz is that the Cold War destroys lives and character. And as the very cynical ending makes clear, the Cold War doesn't seem to be about anything.
The main reason why Topaz is a bit of a letdown is that the central character Frederick Stafford is less interesting and compelling than all the supporting characters. His wife is also quite uninteresting. The film would have worked better if Hitchcock simply avoided using Stafford as a hook for the audience and instead simply make the film without a main character and tell the story of a group of supporting characters. Like a proto-Nashville on an international scale.
(and with the Hays Code gone only the year before, he could give us a film in which the "hero," Andre, was an unrepentant adulterer)
As apparently is his wife, who's implied to have something with Michel Piccoli can't blame her honestly, Piccoli is so much more charismatic than her hubby. But then I don't know what Juanita sees in the hero as well. If I were her I'd choose Rico Parra over him, John Vernon is more cool than Stafford and as Claude Jade said about Cubans, in that uniform, he's quite "wild".
And Roscoe Lee Browne is also quite interesting in that brief role he has. Especially when he challenges Rico Parra as to whether he was "anti-N.g.o" and that subversive statement about there being no race divisions in Cuba...and in the 60's audiences knew damn well there were race divisions in America. One of the clearest expressions of Hitchcock's political leanings as being essentially liberal, even if he was too shy ever to vote.
The thing is the man with most screentime is just boring. If a talented director and a creative team is involved, Topaz can actually be remade to make an interesting film. But then Babel that recent Brad Pitt arthouse film is actually a remake of this film(it has the same plot, same structure and is about international politics) and quite a bad one.
"Ça va by me, madame...Ça va by me!" - The Red Shoes
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ecarle
17 years ago
I'm with you here.
Hitchcock had a problem in having a central character in the Frenchman Andre Devereaux.
Evidently, he hoped for Sean Connery in the role -- I've seen storyboards for "Topaz' with Connery's famous face drawn in for Andre. Well, that wasn't going to work. Connery's a lot of things, but French isn't one of them.
Yves Montand may have been under consideration, but had strong Communist sympathies at the time.
Jean-Paul Belmondo: too young for the role.
And so on. Consequently, I have read that Hitchcock decided to "invent" a male star, just as he did more famously with Tippi Hedren. Hitch looked at a lot of film on many unknown actors and settled on Frederick Strafford. The handsome but colorless Frederick Stafford was meant to be in the Cary Grant/Connery tradition...but looks to me like a disspated, older John Gavin!
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Thus, "Topaz" defaults to all those great supporting characters: international stars like Michel Piccoli and Phillipe Noiret, Canadian John Vernon, and best of all, Roscoe Lee Browne to handle Hitchcock's first truly major black character, DuBois.
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The adultery is interlocking in "Topaz" (and nobody seems to notice it today, but only the "M" rating of the new ratings code allowed it):
With Andre and Nicole as the "married apex" of the triangle, we have:
Rico Parra and Juanita DeCorba
Juanita DeCordoba and Andre Devereaux
Nicole Devereaux and Jacques Granville
In the "suicide ending" version of "Topaz," the triangles are resolved by...killing off Juanita and Granville!
..but honestly, I like some of the early scenes in the Virginia safehouse as the Feds debrief the arrogant Russian. I figure that went on all the time.
I love what one Fed says to John Forsythe about the long trip made by the Russian defector:
Forsythe: He's tired. It was a long trip from Copenhagen.
Fed: Didn't he sleep on the plane? I always do.
...as if a man who just defected his whole family out of Russia forever would just sleep on the plane.
But the defector is arrogant, too. After the big escape he says: "My people would have done it better."
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artihcus022
17 years ago
Oh I loved the Russian defector character. That story is just brilliant.
But the defector is arrogant, too.
Yes. And in his final scene, he reveals this completely unexpected vulgar side of him. He eventually did squeal like the stool pigeon that he is and has become happilly chatty. Consider the line he gives to Deveraux, "These Americans can give you a whole new life. My advise is to hide." Really cynical.
And the scene with the plastic heads and the daughter holding it is downright chilling. Quite a canny portrait of American assimilation as being essentially buying a new life. With the head being a kind of demonstration and model.
It's really interesting because save for Billy Wilder's gloriously cyncial One, Two, Three, no other American film has really shown American culture's perversive dominance during the Cold War as Topaz. Both films interestingly were sold as anti-Communist but ended up being more critical of the American side. Like the Wilder film is perhaps the first film about Coca-Cola Imperialism with Jimmy Cagney playing a Coke Executive like a gangster. And the only character without any cyncism is a naive Communist student who gets dissillusioned with the corruption of East Germany. And the ending is just ironic.
Hitchcock not being a cynic, is more sober. And the film as it ends now with the tossing of that paper of the end of the Missile Crisis like it's a rag contains a lot of moral outrage.
Not that either directors were anti-American. After all, America actually allowed these directors the chance to make their films but they certainly felt that America had no business starting any Cold War.
"Ça va by me, madame...Ça va by me!" - The Red Shoes
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ecarle
17 years ago
The actor who played the Russian defector was recommended to Hitchcock by none other than Ingmar Bergman.
So at least they had THAT in common.
Hitchcock himself told Truffaut in their interviews (before making "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz") that he felt Cold War films were predestined to be failures, though I don't recall him saying why. Hitchcock pointed out a very dull 50's picture called "Night People" (with Greg Peck and Brod Crawford) as an example of such failures.
In any event, Cold War films became quite "hot" in the 60's, and Hitchcock almost forcibly joined in. To the extent that there are some good (if not great) Cold War films, "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz" are definitely among them -- which is why those who leap in against them just don't quite get it, I'm afraid.
Wilder and Hitchcock "got that," given their respective knowledge of Germany and WWII. You know, by the 60's, because of his fame and Universal maven Lew Wasserman's powerful linkages to President Lyndon Johnson, Hitchocck was taking lunches with major State Department figure in the regime of President Johnson, along with foreign officials, At one such lunch with a official from Poland, Hitchcock told the official that "Torn Curtain" would be set THERE (this was before the Iron Curtain element entered in.) "Oh, no, Mr. Hitchcock," said the official, "no movie of war between the United States and Poland, please!" Evidently, Hitch switched the story to East Germany from then on.
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