Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock Productions/Universal, 1969)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Just as the week before TCM had followed up their “Noir Alley” screening of an old Monogram picture with one of Alfred Hitchcock’s later films for Universal, last night they followed up Suspense with Topaz, an O.K. but highly problematical movie Hitchcock made in 1969 on uncertain auspices. Barred by Universal’s edict from making the film he really wanted to do -- Sir James M. Barrie’s 1920 romantic fantasy Mary Rose (which, though it contains no suspense or thriller elements, would have been a marvelous story for the director of Vertigo) -- he had just directed a Cold War spy adventure called Torn Curtain, starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, which had been a flop. Now he was stuck for his next film, and instead of being able to develop his own story he asked Universal to assign him something -- and the something they assigned him was Topaz, a best-selling novel by Exodus author Leon Uris. They also assigned Uris to do the screenplay based on his own book -- a typically sprawling Uris tale involving a confusing welter of plot lines inhabited by cardboard characters, either all good or all bad. Hitchcock and Uris had plenty of arguments over the film, many of them over Hitchcock’s desire to give the villains some human qualities so the film would have the kinds of moral ambiguities Hitchcock had long sought in his stories, and finally Hitchcock fired Uris on the eve of shooting and asked Arthur Laurents, whom he’d worked with on the 1948 film Rope, to rewrite the script. Laurents turned him down, so Hitchcock then approached Samuel Taylor, who’d written the script for Vertigo, to take over.

Taylor agreed but with shooting scheduled to begin almost immediately on a complicated set of locations including Copenhagen, New York, Paris and whatever piece of real estate they used to represent Cuba (the story takes place in October 1962 and deals with the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis; the MacGuffin is the text of the agreement between the Soviet Union and Cuba to put ballistic missiles on the island), he didn’t have time to write the entire movie beforehand. So Taylor would send scenes to the set sometimes minutes before Hitchcock shot them -- a style of filmmaking Hitchcock hated. He always liked to have his storyboards drawn and the script in absolutely final form before he shot a frame, and he would sometimes demoralize his actors by telling them on the first day of shooting that for him the fun part of filmmaking -- the preparation -- had already happened. The opening credits are shown over one of the Soviet Union’s big parades of military hardware down the streets of Moscow -- a sort of arms display soon-to-be-ex-President Donald Trump wanted to bring to the U.S. -- and we see a title that abruptly and unmistakably makes this film’s status as Cold War propaganda all too clear: “Somewhere in this crowd is a high Russian official who disagrees with his government's display of force and what it threatens. Very soon his conscience will force him to attempt an escape while apparently on a vacation with his family.” The Russian defector is Boris Godunov -- oops, I mean Kuzenov (Per-Axel Arosenius) -- and he makes his way out of Copenhagen with his wife (Sonja Kolthoff) and daughter (Tina Hedstrom) in an operation so clumsy that when he finally makes it to Washington, D.C. he criticizes its ineptitude directly to the face of the man who masterminded it, CIA official Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe, the only member of this cast you’re likely to have heard of before).

As he’s being debriefed he lets the CIA know that there is a highly placed Russian mole in the French delegation to NATO, code-named “Columbine” (a name with much greater and more sinister referents now than it had in 1969!), and he’s the head of a whole group of Russian double agents in the French government called “Topaz.” Among the information the Russians are expecting to get via “Topaz” is how much the United States knows about Russia’s ongoing plans to put ballistic missiles in Cuba, including digging the silos for them and sending soldiers to staff the bases. Because Cubans in general and officials in Fidel Castro’s government in particular won’t deal with Americans, Nordstrom recruits French intelligence agent Andre Devereaux (Frederick Stafford, the closest thing this movie has to a star). The two Cubans Devereaux is particularly interested in are Rico Parra (John Vernon) and his assistant Luis Uribe (Don Randolph), members of Fidel Castro’s security detail when he comes to New York to speak at the United Nations in October 1962 and stays at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, a mostly Black establishment (which at the time was run, by the way, by former 1930’s and 1940’s bandleader Andy Kirk, whose band, the Clouds of Joy, launched the career of the first major female jazz instrumentalist, arranger and composer, Mary Lou Williams) where Castro stayed because he wanted “a real working-class hotel.” There’s an oddly slapstick scene in which Devereaux sends Phillipe Dubois (Roscoe Lee Browne), a Black florist whose shop is near the hotel, to steal the document so it can be photographed; Dubois and his assistant steal the entire briefcase but aren’t able to return it before Parra notices the loss, has his security detail chase Dubois and try to shoot him -- he makes it back to the flower shop in time but Henri takes the fall and, we’re told later, is tortured and executed once he and Parra return to Cuba.

Parra has a mistress, Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor), who unbeknownst to him is not only Devereaux’s affair partner when he’s in Cuba but also the leader of a cell in the anti-Castro Cuban resistance and has installed fellow resisters in Parra’s home as his household staff. In the film’s best scenes, she sends out another anti-Castro Cuban couple to take photographs of the missile bases under construction and the missiles themselves being off-loaded from Russian ships; they get the photos out of the country but her agents are caught and killed, and in the film’s most characteristically “Hitchcockian” scene Parra, who knows she’s in the resistance because one of the agents gave her up under torture before she died, greets her with an embrace, then shoots her, with her long purple dress billowing out under her as she falls dead. (It’s an interesting inversion of the famous scene in Notorious in which Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant find the hidden uranium in Claude Rains’ wine cellar and pose as clandestine lovers to throw Rains off the scent -- when they really were lovers until she met Rains, he proposed to her and Grant,her government handler, told her to go ahead and marry him because that would get her closer to him and the ring of escaped Nazis in Argentina.)

Alas, after Hitchcock and Taylor wrap up the Cuban storyline the film turns flat and dull again, mostly shots of people talking in rooms as they try to figure out who the members of “Topaz” are and how the U.S. and France can plug the leak that’s allowing valuable information from and about NATO to flow to the Soviet Union. Ultimately the second-in-command of “Topaz,” Henri Jarre (French comedian Philippe Noiret) is found out, though he’s killed by the Russians before U.S. or French agents can question him, and in the end “Columbine,” the head of Topaz, is revealed to be Jacques Granville (Michel Piccoli), an old friend of both Devereaux and his wife Nicole (Dany Robin, made up to look like the classic “Hitchcock blonde” but with virtually no depth to her characterization and saddled with one of the worst “French” accents of all time when she’s speaking English -- one wishes she and Frederick Stafford had been allowed to speak French in their scenes en famille and been subtitled instead of having to hear her unequal struggle with English). There’s a final chase scene with Granville trying to escape once he knows the U.S. and French authorities are on to him, and Hitchcock actually shot three different endings. In one, Granville flies out of the country to seek asylum in the Soviet Union, and he and Devereaux pass each other and wave as they fly out of France in different planes. In one, the Russians off-handedly kill Granville now that he’s no longer of use to them. The third ending, the one that exists in most prints (including the one we saw), was pieced together from previously shot material and shows Granville going into his home, followed by the camera pulling back as we hear a shot, indicating that Granville has committed suicide.

Topaz is not one of Hitchcock’s better movies -- it’s one he personally disliked (fortunately he had at least one more masterpiece up his sleeve -- his next movie, Frenzy, a tale of a sexually motivated serial killer in London in 1972, blessedly free of Cold War allusions and returning Hitchcock to the sort of domestic murder mystery that was one of the things he did best) -- and it’s obvious that both the convoluted structure of Uris’s novel and the unsettled writing situation challenged Hitchcock in all the wrong ways. It’s also obvious that, forced to write it on the fly, Samuel Taylor never had a chance to give the villains the kinds of humanizing qualities Hitchcock wanted. It occurred to me that the writer Hitchcock really needed on the project was John le Carre, who had emerged with his book The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and already had shown himself capable of doing these sorts of espionage tales without Cold War editorializing or James Bond-ish derring-do and making the characters on both sides interesting and multidimensional. (It’s a real pity Hitchcock never filmed anything by le Carre; the two would seem to have been perfect for each other.)

As it stands, Topaz is a perfectly decent but mediocre espionage thriller, and if it didn’t carry Hitchcock’s name as director it probably would have a better reputation than it does -- but we expect more from Alfred Hitchcock than a leaden spy tale with no-name actors. And all the actors in it are no-name (John Forsythe, and maybe Roscoe Lee Browne, are the only people in it you’re likely to have heard of) because in his immediately previous film, Torn Curtain, he had used Paul Newman and Julie Andrews in the leads and their large salaries and profit points had significantly reduced Hitchcock’s own compensation for making the film. As much as Hitchcock had worked as far outside the studio system as he could get during its (and his) heyday, it had enabled him to get stars of the caliber of Cary Grant and James Stewart for reasonable fees; in the post-studio era Hitchcock was just one more producer-director who had either to put up the big money free-lance stars could demand or do without them. Bruce Dern recalled being told by Hitchcock on the set of Hitchcock’s last film, Family Plot, that the reason he had got the lead in it was that someone named “Packinow” had wanted $1 million to play the role. It took Dern a while to realize that “Packinow” was Al Pacino, and Hitchcock said to Dern, “Alfred Hitchcock doesn’t pay $1 million to anybody.” (At that, I don’t think Family Plot would have been as good with Pacino in the lead; it needed a less intense, more “ordinary” person to play the marginal Hollywood loser, and Dern was perfect for the role.) Topaz isn’t a bad movie; it’s just that you expect more from Alfred Hitchcock, and I suspect 1969 audiences did too since the film was a commercial flop.