So much average

Great Film overall

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It's rather hard to get a fix on Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz, and all too easy to reflexively brush it aside as an illustration of the director's supposed late-career artistic exhaustion. As with many spy films of the period, exhaustion is actually central to its theme, of men (it's usually men) in suits sublimating their personal lives to the grand geopolitical struggle, even though the specific contribution of their life-threatening exploits to that struggle is often unclear, especially on the many occasions when one's masters prove untrustworthy (the treacherous scheme behind the film's title seems like such an example of privileged access and power collapsing in on itself). Topaz has a lot of rather flatly played conversation between such men, interspersed with set-pieces which intermittently exhibit Hitchcock's legendary compositional genius and visual intensity. It makes you reflect though how often those fraught set-pieces drew on explicitly voyeuristic or neurotic underpinnings - Topaz by comparison is drained of much in the way of desire or obsession, or even recognizable human demonstrativeness. The film's abstraction - its lack of interest in any kind of cultural specificity (the two main Cuban characters are played by a Canadian and a German) - becomes its own kind of statement on the milieu's moral confusion, bolstered by an unusually sprawling narrative that keeps shifting focus between locations and protagonists, reflecting the underlying sense of ambiguous ethics and boundaries. While it feels like an old man's film in many ways, the cast contains a startling number of actors from the French New Wave (it's a rich resource for any Bacon-type degrees-of-separation exercise), providing its own sense of renewal; Michel Piccoli's cheery wave in the final moments, and the final shot of a newspaper being blown away, suggest that whatever the momentousness of the world events in the background, the director is mostly interested in moving on from them.

This film should have been titled Torpor. Hitchcock, who in his best films was interested in plot merely as a means to guide the audience from sequence to sequence, here presented a film that is entirely plot — there isn't any memorable sequence and little in the way of engaging performances. The two films that Hitchcock directed prior to this — Marnie and Torn Curtain — at least had striking sequences that generated suspense and excitement. In the former, the riding sequence ending in the injury and killing of the horse and the sequence of Marnie stealing money from the Rutland firm; in the latter, the murder of the agent in the farmhouse and the panic in the theater, to name a few examples.The relatively weak box office performances of those films put Hitchcock in the position of needing a hit. Hitchcock thought that a story about recent international spycraft would do the trick, even though Torn Curtain, which had a similar basis, had been tepid at the box office. Adapting the Leon Uris novel for the screen proved problematic, even though Uris was a veteran screenwriter. Hitchcock usually had a film all planned out before any production was done; filming was simply the work to put the director's vision on film. Topaz went into production without a finished script. The result is a film that moves from routine dialogue scene to routine dialogue scene without any distinctive touch. Even the death of the Karin Dor character is oddly flat in its impact. Only the supporting players, and Karin Dor, gave some hint of character. John Forsythe and Frederick Stafford seem to be caught in an ad for men's suits (Botany 500 probably). John Vernon works on the sort of accent used in the Mission Impossible series: "Jyoo weeel tell ahss the theengs jyoo haff dohn." Hitchcock seems to have been adrift here. Two of his key collaborators on the great films of the Fifties — Robert Burks on camera and George Tomasini in the editing room — were no longer available (Marnie was the last film they would work on); he couldn't get a satisfactory script. The result was a film made to fulfill a contract. Any director could have done this film. Even Don Siegel would have made it better-paced.

If you are into thrillers and especially espionage and spy versus spy versus spy then maybe this picture is designed for you...or maybe not. Personally I was disappointed. I thought the presence of John Forsythe, John Vernon and Frederick Stafford and the film being directed by Alfred Hitchcock would lead to a blockbuster film but it just did not appeal to me.First of all, Hitchcock tried to keep us guessing who were the good spies and who were the bad spies. After the first hour of the film I just did not care anymore. Not that I found the film was confusing, no, I just found the story boring and the acting less than suspenseful. After several scenes where the interaction of both the male and female stars are exchanging information related to Russia's military involvement and support of Cuba against the United States it began to remind me of the famous Abbott and Costello comedy skit, "Whose On First?" I mean come on man, if Hitchcock had the last say on editing (which I assume he did because the films length was an extended 2 hours and 23 minutes) than maybe he should have positioned who were the good spies and who were the bad spies a lot earlier and cut the films length by at least 20-30 minutes. As for Hitchcock's trademark cinematography style of shooting wide angle overhead shots these were also below par for a Hitchcock directed film. As two examples, the early scene where U.S. agent Michael Nordstrom played by John Forsythe is leading the defection of a Russian diplomat and his wife and daughter on to a plane that is headed to the U.S. and also in a latter scene when French diplomat Andre Devereaux played by Frederick Stafford is running up an endless apartment stairwell to see if his son-in-law has been hurt was not the classic and suspenseful scenes that we have become accustomed to in Hitchcock films. As the film Topaz was one of Hitchcock's last few films I think it just shows that what worked for Hitchcock in the past two decades for his superb use of his cameras, cinematography, sound, as well as with his noted ability to generate continued suspense was clearly missing in Topaz as was Hitchcock's magic mojo also absent.The films ending was pretty flat and boring as well. I give Topaz a passable 5 out of 5 and maybe that is even a bit too generous.

I am fond of "old", Cold War spy movies and I try to watch/re-watch them bit by bit. True, they have multiple similar type of characters and solutions, particularly with the entrance of James Bond movies, but in the event of smooth plot and pleasant performances, you will not have blah feelings. I can't remember I have seen Topaz before, but, on the alike many other viewers here, I was not "put off" by the name of Alfred Hitchcock; as I knew the plot briefly, I did not expect any thrilling suspension in the style of Psycho.Nevertheless, I liked the movie in general, particularly direction and cinematography; as for the cast, there were no excelling performances, Frederick Stafford as André Devereaux was not very charismatic, and the French actors made conversations in English even if talking to themselves (a feature seldom visible in recent movies where dubbing or subtitles are used in scenes concerned). The plot was okay as well, especially the places I have visited, but decades later, and if we consider that the Cuban-Western crisis is not totally over until now... The events were nicely round-up, twists were explained at some point, and general logic was maintained throughout the movie. And last but not least: Topaz is a color movie, enabling to enjoy beautiful landscapes and city space.