With a note on the recent cable movie The Girl, on Tippi Hedren’s having been harassed by Hitchcock in the early 1960s
[References to books on certain details are made within the text via the authors’ last names. For full bibliographic information, see end of entry. Edit done 10/21/12.]
In view of recent media “50-year” acknowledgments of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it may not be out of line to look at Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969), which I’ve been itching for an excuse to write on for some months. This film, based on a novel by Leon Uris, is about some political doings that were on the fringe of—or generally related to—the more famous aspects of the Crisis that we know about, where the more well-known activity involved U.S. air reconnaissance (via U2 flights) on what was going on in Cuba, high-level meetings between President Kennedy and advisors, and of course Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev sending cables back and forth to Kennedy. According to Uris’s novel, there was a European portion of the whole set of Cold War business connected to Cuba, and the slightly fictionalized version of this eventually was made into a movie by Hitchcock.
(It’s interesting how the press has handled the Crisis in recent weeks. There was an article, from a news entity like the Associated Press or some other subscription service, that wrote about the matter of Kennedy agreeing to withdraw missiles from Turkey as part of a semi–quid-pro-quo deal whereby Khrushchev would remove the missiles from Cuba, as if the Turkey-missiles aspect hadn’t been known before. But that has been known for a long time, I think since the 1970s, certainly since the 1980s.)
It is unclear how much the movie, or the novel, reflects the details of reality—and the Cuban Missile Crisis, as I know from having read Thirteen Days, Robert F. Kennedy’s 1969 memoir on it, is something you have to stick to the tiny details on. In the story of Topaz, at least one detail is fictionally changed (McGilligan, p. 683), but apparently the book was close enough to reality that a threat of a government lawsuit loomed over it (in about 1968). But if the movie (as well as the novel) largely reflects reality, it conveys an intriguing part of the Soviets’ ways of holding sway over things (or trying to) in the early 1960s, and our ways of trying to counter this. It was real-life spy-and-counterspy stuff, not the James Bond fantasies that were starting to become popular in the movies.
And as it happened, Hitchcock—who in 1946 had fashioned one of his own, eventually-classic early–Cold War espionage thrillers, with a romantic angle, in Notorious—seemed in the 1960s eager, if only for “old time’s sake,” to update the genre. Torn Curtain (1966) was his first attempt at this, and it had been a notorious failure at the box office (McGilligan, p. 675). He wanted to try again, with a less obviously “romanticizing” story—something dealing with the gritty facts of espionage (pp. 683-84, 685). He had to receive education from the federal government on some of this (p. 688). But he eventually made Topaz, which with all its attention to not-usually-personalized details, is fairly atypical of Hitchcock.
Topaz is no one’s favorite Hitchcock film, and it doesn’t make anyone’s recent 10 Best Hitchcock lists. But to me it is one of the more watchable of his late films—this category being those that start either with Marnie (1964) or with Torn Curtain (1966), and run through Topaz, Frenzy (1972), and Family Plot (1976).
Hitchcock’s health issues were a handicap
At about 65, Hitchcock was old—by 1960s and 1970s standards he was—when he started production on Torn Curtain, which would be released in 1966. He had had infirmities since the 1950s, at least some of which probably gave him pause to think about his mortality. Among health issues he faced by early 1957 were a navel hernia and colitis, and then gallstones, for which he was treated when Vertigo was in preproduction (McGilligan, pp. 545-46); that movie’s production was pushed off because of his health issues. He was approaching 60 at the time; surely, when in those days 60 was “old,” he was thinking he didn’t have a whole lot of time left to do projects that he held dear and that ordinarily would take a lot of time.
By 1969, about a decade later, in the midst of the Topaz production process, his involvement in and dedication to his moviemaking were definitely declined for very practical, health-related reasons. He had to lie down a lot, a fact remarked on by the only actor in Topaz recognizable to American audiences, John Forsythe, who had played the preppie artist in The Trouble with Harry (1955). As Forsythe said, “He was no longer the great brain that sat in the chair watching ’round him. […] He would go away for fifteen or twenty minutes and lie down if he could, and it was sad to see” (McGilligan, pp. 691-92). Hitchcock made mistakes such as filming backgrounds he didn’t use (McGilligan, p. 691), and there were plenty of other messes.
What helped the film were the screenwriter and, double-edged sword, the budget
After an abortive attempt to use Uris as the screenwriter, Hitchcock invited Samuel Taylor to write the script—Taylor who had been one of the main writers for Vertigo (1958; the other for Vertigo was Alec Coppel, who did not work on Topaz). Taylor
But Taylor Taylor
Despite the just-quoted remark about the “money clock,” I think a factor that has ended up helping the film succeed as a finished product is that it had the highest budget for any of Hitchcock’s films (McGilligan, p. 688). This made for enough richness of incident and portraying of a situation—Hitchcock has always been good at expressing so much of his story visually—that, carried along by this aspect, you could end up excusing some of the film’s passing flaws (in acting or whatever else).
But budget wasn’t a panacea; with such an elaborate production process on a tight schedule (McGilligan, p. 688 on the schedule), and Hitchcock’s health dicey, this film was a major challenge at best. There were many practical problems in its production—some arising from an apparent lack of preplanning (meanwhile, as McGilligan notes, Hitchcock could only hope he could recreate the “halcyon [production] days” of the late 1950s for himself [p. 688]).
The script, which was started with a good college try by Taylor
What Topaz was about
I will give a tiny sketch of the plot, noting that I don’t know how much was fictionalized, but at the least, you can thread your way through understanding the film as you go, and suppose that even if 80 percent were true, it shows what labyrinthine things could go on during the Cold War. If this plot outline seems complicated, it is; it’s probably made easier to digest if you watch the movie.
There was a spy ring in the French government; two of the men involved (I’m not sure if there were more, in real life) composed a group code-named “Topaz” (though the term gets differently used in the film, including for one member of the ring, which variation in use I think was due to script carelessness, not typical of screenwriter Samuel Taylor); they worked for the Soviets. They passed on NATO military secrets to the Soviets. One of the men was a French resistance associate with a straight-arrow intelligence sort, who is the hero of the film (he is played by Frederick Stafford, an actor who was Austrian, I believe). This man, as it happens, is married to a woman—the one played by Dany Robin, also a European actress—who, with her husband and the Topaz male, comprised a threesome that had worked within the French resistance. The woman was secretly in love with the Topaz male. So, a love triangle tarts things up for Hitch.
The film starts, however, with the defection of a Soviet scientist and his wife and daughter; they are helped to get to the U.S. (European locations are used in this film, by the way) by a CIA operative played by John Forsythe. The defector is questioned relentlessly by American operatives—he affirms that military information, which had been passed through the hands of the French government, had ended up with his own country, the Soviet Union. More importantly, he eventually reveals he knows some stuff going on with Cuba and missiles.
In the wake of this discovery, the John Forsythe character teams up with the French straight-arrow agent, and has him go get some photographs of files in the possession of a Cuban Communist, an underling of Castro’s, named Rico Parra, who happens to visit New York as some sort of diplomatic visit (Parra is played, well, by a Canadian actor named John Vernon). The French straight-arrow agent has the help of a Caribbean occasional-spy-work type played by Roscoe Lee Browne, the only Black actor of any note who has a role in any Hitchcock film, I believe.
The French straight-arrow agent eventually travels to Cuba, to gather more information for the Americans (with the American point man, again, the John Forsythe agent). In the process the French agent meets up with a Cuban revolutionary, Juanita, who is a consort of Rico Parra (apparently in real life, this woman was Castro’s sister, not someone unrelated to Castro—a “widow of a hero of the Revolution,” as Parra declares—as in the film). The French agent, not so straight-arrow in this regard, and Juanita have an ongoing affair. (Eventually, Parra catches wind of Juanita’s treachery, and he kills her, leading to the film’s most famous image, her sinking to the floor with her long skirt spreading out like a flower.)
With the French agent’s intelligence work, the Americans apparently have enough information with which to bargain harder with the Soviets to get the missiles removed. Moreover, after the Soviet defector has told the Americans about the Topaz ring in the French government, when the John Forsythe character and the French straight-arrow agent go to France, they aid in exposing the ring enough that—in an odd, slightly unclear scene near the end—it is effectively neutralized after, first, one of its members commits suicide, and then the other member, who is the French straight-arrow agent’s French resistance colleague, decides to defect to the Soviet Union.
What makes the film work
Many modern viewers may find this film a bore, with flaws including a kitchen scene involving Cuban underworkers (preparing spying equipment) that is performed so woodenly it’s laughable. But I happen to like this film, despite its flaws.
If this was a film that was not Hitchcock’s finest hour as a director, I think it still came out not completely irredeemable, because—one main reason—the story of intrigue, which does not require elaborate focus on character, where coherence, subtlety, and detail are so important, is what gets us through the many scenes. The story being a close look at an area of Cold War intrigue in itself interests me, as I have long been a Cold War buff.
The fact of the intriguing story gives some framework of intelligibility to (or an incentive to trace out) the elaborate goings-on.
Meanwhile, this particular story is all the more digestible for its not being quite as complex as I’ve just hinted. In those days, stories were not quite as rapidly turned out in tiny details, requiring your close attention, as movies do today.
So as Hitchcock’s biggest-budget work from 1966 through 1976, I think it’s perhaps his one movie from that time worth seeing, more than once.
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On Tippi Hendren, and Hitch at his ugliest
The story on how actress Tippi Hedren was (per today’s conceptualizations and language) sexually harassed by Hitchcock, and how he sabotaged her career afterward, is an interesting story on a sad aspect to Hedren’s career. Of course, Hitchcock’s sabotaging her career I’ve never understood and I see as mean, to say the least.
I would only comment on the harassment side of things in the following few ways.
First, the sexual harassment business during the production of Marnie (see my February 10 blog entry on the movie alone) has already been pretty closely studied in literature on Hitchcock. An early treatment in Donald Spoto’s book The Dark Side of Genius actually posed the Hedren problem as the climax for the thematic arc with which Spoto discusses Hitchcock. This book, published in 1983, takes a psychoanalytic look at Hitchcock, though this is in a way that today may seem old-fashioned. The book may be off on some details of Hitchcock’s life and career, but I think is still an interesting first look for people new to Hitchcock. The psychological angle, shaping the biography throughout, may get tiresome or tendentious at times. But it is angle that I think is useful for getting a handle on Hitch, who I think as a character is very ripe for being seen as a problem personality while also being a major technical innovator and artistic statement-maker among the major film directors in history, who still has influence on filmmakers. This fact should be pretty familiar.
Spoto’s psychological angle seems to reach its climax when it comes to Hedren’s experience with Hitch, which—during Marnie—seems to have been when Hitch went by far most beyond his usual bounds in “coming on” to an actress (there were, of course, other, previous instances of this in his life). His time with Hedren was also when he—for his own peculiar purposes—ran into a brick wall with this coming-on tendency (and it actually seems to have paralleled his suddenly losing enthusiasm for the film, and becoming more perfunctory with finishing it up). He seems never to have tried the coming-on move, at least to such an extent, on an actress again. Spoto’s treatment of the Marnie set of experiences is on pp. 495-505.
Hitch’s hitting a brick wall with Hedren probably was potentiated in part—I’m speaking generally, not posing any sort of incisive “deep reading”—by the fact that he was old around the time of, and after, working with Hedren. He was already about 63 when he worked on The Birds. After work on Marnie, he may have lost the will, as some general trend, to do his “coming on” to women as he was becoming more infirm. However, in McGilligan’s book (pp. 690-91), there is a droll little story of his relating to German actress Karin Dor (who played the Juanita character) during a promotional photo shoot for Topaz; the insinuating misstep he made amounted to very little, and did not seem to cause offense to Dor.
Patrick McGilligan’s own book, from 2003, benefits as an overall survey of Hitchcock from deriving information from the many sources on him that had arisen since 1983. His treatment of the Hedren/Marnie period is on pp. 634 to about 649. There seems to be some controversy or incompleteness on some details of his harassment of her, but overall enough is known to give an enlightening enough picture.
There is more to this story (in terms of incidents and interpretation) over the longer term than I am giving here, and I don’t mean to brush it off by being cursory with it.
I’m sure different people, men or women, will respond to the story of the TV movie The Girl different ways, though there probably will be pretty general consensus. (I don’t intend to see it, by the way.) There is no question that Hitchcock’s coming on to Hedren as he did both was expressive of a strong problem on his part and was the type of thing that, today, would get the relevant type of lawyer (representing the aggrieved party) rubbing his or her hands together in glee.
Spurred by the new TV movie, there will probably be debate on Hitchcock of the type that arises whenever this kind of sexual-indiscretion story comes up, as has in obviously separate incidents with directors Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. I would add that, as many other people will (justifiably enough) defend Hitch as to his artistic qualities (and here, I am not trying to excuse Hitch’s unprofessional behavior with Hedren in the production of Marnie), I think it’s true that Hitch’s relationship with Hedren “behind the scenes,” whether hot or cool, does seem to have added something constructive to the acting quality she has in this film, which is a far more complex and interesting work than the, to me, gimmicky The Birds.
It’s also to be noted that Hedren has spoken approvingly enough about Hitchcock in other contexts, such as in a recent New York Times Magazine interview and in her interview comments appended to a DVD release of Marnie within the past decade or so. In general, as troubling as sexual harassment can be, in artistic contexts especially, it is not necessarily situated in a grim overall situation or work relationship, but there can be numerous positives too. (This is not to deny that Hedren’s acting career didn’t amount to much after her work with Hitchcock.)
And more generally, for some time I would have characterized Marnie as the kind of film that is as sensitive as it is to a female kind of issues because the director who made it (in the ironic way that a variety of personal problems can inject some life into the artistic work of all sorts of artists) had “a deep problem with women.”
References
Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1969). This book is a good firsthand account, and is short; by no means should it be considered a definitive account, but is a very good first step to take in learning about the Crisis.
Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (New York: ReganBooks, 2003).
