Movie break: An easily-digestible cookie of a Hitchcock film: Torn Curtain (1966)

For a time-whiling nerd-out, this political-suspense tale still may please you

(First in a series of blog entries, titled “Which side is he on?”)

Subsections below:

Later Hitchcock works: a series of lesser items from which to choose “lesser evils”

Hitchcock as an elderly artist whose later oeuvre roughly exemplifies a pattern of attenuation and decline

Some historical background regarding the Cold War

The film’s story

Various actors in the film, and little baubles of fun parts

The German flavor within this combo plate

The murder of Gromek, and the music situation

A turning point for Hitchcock

[Edits 8/29/13. More edits 9/3/13. More edits 9/4/13. Edit 11/8/13.]

You might say, “Uh-uh. I don’t want to go there. Too many foreigners in it, the music’s all wrong, and some of the visuals are phony.” Are you talking about a once-favorite restaurant in Manhattan that’s gone downhill? No, it’s Hitch’s Torn Curtain. But this film may be just the right comfort food for a dreary weekend afternoon. Before we take it in itself, let’s look at some of the history.

Later Hitchcock works: a series of lesser items from which to choose “lesser evils”

As a fan, or even a film historian, may well know, Hitchcock’s train of later films was, by and large, not among his best. Opinions may differ on when he ceased being great. Psycho (1960) is both a famous landmark for him and for horror films in general, and it even gets regarded as a landmark for films (and related culture) much more broadly. The Birds (1963) also gets counted in top 10 lists for his films, though I think it’s a landmark in horror films but also a bit overrated.

Somewhat more controversial, Marnie (1964) gets more respect than it did originally, and though it may strike modern viewers as a bit old-fashioned and clunky in some ways, I think it is right to include it in a top 10 list for Hitchcock, and as the tailpiece of his great ten-year peak period. This “great decade” included most of his best films (while many are best in very different ways), in a streak almost no other director may match—from Rear Window (1954) to Marnie, which streak includes To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), his second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Wrong Man (1957), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho, and The Birds.

After Marnie, nearly everyone is in agreement that he was no longer at the top of his form: Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969; see my review here), Frenzy (1972), and Family Plot (1976). A large part of the reason that he got less good is that he was getting old. By the time he had done Psycho, he was about 60. This was old for then; today, it is a younger baby boomer’s age (and people that age today might still cut an impressive figure playing electric guitar for an enthusiastic crowd). Biographies on Hitch note various health problems he had starting in the late 1950s, such as a set of things that sidelined him for part of the lead-up to production of Vertigo in 1957. (Backup in Patrick McGilligan; see End note 1 below.) His being overweight and, as time would show, his being apt to self-medicate with alcohol didn’t help entirely.

Patrick McGilligan in his biography notes that Hitchcock still seemed dapper and fit when making Marnie (McG, p. 684). Thereafter, it was downhill (such as after finishing Marnie and when he was back from vacation, McG., p. 656). During the 1968-69 production for Topaz, he had to lie down periodically (McG., pp. 691-92); by the time he made Frenzy in 1971, he habitually had a mixed drink (with working colleagues) to get him through the day (though by this point, after going a bit to excess, his drinking seems to have been “regulated”; McG., pp. 700-01). And in the later 1970s he progressively headed toward being unable to do the last film idea in his pipeline after Family Plot. When you see him in stills for the making of Torn Curtain, whose production was in late 1965 and early 1966, he does look old.

It may seem tempting to compare his later-life waning output with that of Stanley Kubrick, and this is helpful only in a very broad and shallow way. Hitchcock’s career spanned much of the development of the motion picture industry, from silents in the 1920s through the 1930s talkies he made in Great Britain (where his best films seem to be The 39 Steps [1935] and The Lady Vanishes [1938]). Then, newly in the U.S. by about 1940, he brought his exquisite sense of how to effect suspense, macabre humor, psychological insight, and incidental obsessions about women to what in the 1940s had been developing in U.S. films anyway as a sort of noir culture. Then he was on to his great period of the 1950s, when he seemed to surpass the accepted genres and his own trademark manners (which he developed in his earlier work) and exemplified a sort of great director’s masterly method of rendering visually oriented, psychologically acute suspense stories that were in some ways closer to great literature (as least as far as film can get with that) than mere genre pieces. After this, he had every right to be tired by the mid-1960s.

Plus, by the late 1950s, the industry was changing—the studio system of the 1930s-50s was collapsing, and the 1960s were a sort of transition between that and the work that was more auteur-oriented (from the director side) and edgy-story-angled (in meeting audience demands) that typified the best 1970s work. In part, this reflected the economy (End note 2), but it also reflected what baby boomers, in particular, wanted out of popular art. (On some global accounting of this, see Peter Biskind [End note 3].)

Hitchcock as an elderly artist whose later oeuvre roughly exemplifies a pattern of attenuation and decline

Both Hitchcock and Kubrick were similar in one respect: they were recognized by studios and critics as artists of a special kind, and each got a home in one of the longstanding American studios, which could both help and hinder the director: Hitchcock, as is well detailed in a work like McGilligan’s, in about 1963 became installed as a sort of grand “house director” (my rough term) at Universal, partly as a result of its being taken over my MCA, the company owned by his agent Lew Wasserman. This studio also wanted to be a little classier, even while it was branching into TV. Meanwhile, in about 1971, Kubrick became sheltered by Warner Brothers after his association with the studio MGM, with 2001 (1968) and his stumble in  the failure of the Napoleon film-project in about 1969.

Universal got Hitch when he was just past his peak, but it seems they didn’t mind. Meanwhile, per their own agenda, they would also make demands on him to cater to the tastes of a younger audience that was really a group Hitch couldn’t entirely understand (End note 4).

Kubrick, in an area I cannot do justice to here, seems to have felt a pressure—whether or not made explicit to him—to deliver product that had a likelihood to bring in good box office as long as Warners was his distributing studio, and the studio left Kubrick alone to do his films his own way with his own production company (Hobby Films, at least in the later 1990s) in England. This may help explain, along with his technical perfectionism and his apparent trouble in finding stories that would suit him (within 1971-99), why his films became both more spaced out in time and yet each seemingly calculated to make a big splash as the type of film it was presented as.

When Hitchcock did Torn Curtain, he was chastened by the critical and commercial failure (if that isn’t too strong) of Marnie (End note 5), and he approached Torn Curtain as a way to capitalize on the market for Cold War/spy movies that the James Bond franchise was suddenly finding so lucrative (even if it took a somewhat cartoonish approach to it). In fact, Hitch was so drawn to the Cold War/spy angle that he tried it again with Topaz, with results that, depending on viewpoint, were either decidedly mixed compared to Torn Curtain, or even worse.

I’ve considered Torn Curtain to be among his worst post-Marnie films; and even though it is derivative of his own work in terms of the scheme of scenes and of detail-level technique, it is ironic that Hitchcock was still such a capable director that this film isn’t too terrible to watch. With TC, he was sure to do what he could to have a story told in images (and suspense) as much as possible, in the same way that is conveyed in his larger body of work, which oeuvre would influence many younger directors to ape his agile camerawork and tricks to induce suspense.

That is, if you keep your expectations rather low (for a Hitch film), this one still goes down pretty well, even if you want to be entertained on a rainy Saturday and don’t want to think, or be tested, too much. And if you grew up during part of the Cold War and kind of miss what the world was like then, this film gives you some stimulus for nostalgia.

Some historical background regarding the Cold War

Today, among younger viewers, so many aspects of the Cold War seem like ancient history. Things that would be as obvious to me as some standard math or religious learnings are probably alien to these young viewers. So, to help you orient this film, a crazily thumbnail sketch:

By the 1960s there was a missile race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (the Soviet Union). It basically started in the 1950s, when the A bombs and the newer (and more powerful) H bombs were being tested. Early on, the U.S. relied on the truck-like B-52 bombers to deliver (if ever used) the bombs; these planes are part of the focus of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. But as missile technology was developing, missiles became the vehicle of choice  for delivering nuclear bombs (or “warheads” as the bomb-form was for missiles). This was facilitated (on the ethereal technical level, and in terms of securing popular support) by the space race (our Apollo shots were coming in succession through the 1960s, climaxing in a landing on the Moon in 1969).

Meanwhile, there were attempts—amid sane enough fear among leaders about the possibility of a nuclear war, while knowing it would be beyond catastrophic—between the superpowers to accumulate treaties to limit the development of nuclear weapons (“nukes,” as the slang short term was) of certain kinds and in certain locations. There was a treaty banning placing nukes on the seabed in the early 1960s. There were numerous other types of limiting or banning treaties sought, and sometimes secured, over the decades. There were also various summits—high-level meetings of leaders—through the years. For instance, President Johnson met with Alexei Kosygin, a high-level functionary of the U.S.S.R., in 1967. President Nixon famously had numerous summits with Soviet leaders.

By 1972, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty was signed by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. This forbade development of nuclear (or non-nuclear) weapons that could target the other side’s offensively used weapons when in flight. This was an important milestone that represented a high point of U.S./Soviet attempts to limit nukes until about 1983, when President Reagan initiated the so-called “Star Wars” program. This latter was a research program to try to come up with ways to protect against incoming Soviet missiles. Some considered it in violation of the ABM treaty. The Soviets, of course, feared we actually would achieve something under this program, even though to some Americans at the time it seemed too dreamy—almost like an improbable umbrella shielding us from Soviet nukes, which Reagan Administration public relations talk at the time more or less depicted it as.

And (don’t worry—this all won’t be on the test) there did seem to be a rock-hard aspect to “enemies,” even though we made attempts with them to come up with agreements, like the ABM treaty, and the SALT I and SALT II talks—“SALT” = “Strategic Arms Limitations Talks.” The attempts in the early 1970s to “lessen tensions” with the Soviets was called “détente,” the French word for the English phrase. Today, détente gets derided for some reason, but it made sense at the time. And our enemies included not just the Soviet Union (the U.S.S.R.)—which included the Russian Federation, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and what are now some of the central Asian “-stans” (Kyrgyzstan, etc.)—but there were a host of European countries that were allied with the Soviets in what was called, by the West, the “East Bloc”: these countries included Poland, Czechoslovakia (which later divided), Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia (in a sense it was part of the East Bloc; its leader Marshall Josip Broz Tito broke with Stalin in about 1948), Bulgaria, and…East Germany. Yes, Germany was divided into West and East Germany, and within East Germany was the big, old city of Berlin, which itself was divided into East (Communist) and West (pro-Western) Berlin.

You feel like getting out your old European History textbook, right?

All this is to explain the background of this film, which itself is pretty birdbrained in terms of its simplifying outlining of its political and scientific concerns. In some ways, it’s fairer to say that so much of the above was taken for granted in 1965 (by anyone who was educated and followed the news) that the movie itself didn’t have to explain too much background, to deliver—however pretentious or not it seemed—its spy story, surrounding the Hitchcockian “Macguffin” of a scientific (mathematic) formula, while the spy tale also was tied to a romantic story.

The film’s story

The story was actually, according to McGilligan (see especially p. 665), developed in its main features by Hitchcock, with the first screenplay drafted by Brian Moore and given a dialogue polish by the English writers Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall (p. 669; they are uncredited in the film, per a Writers Guild arbitration decision).

Paul Newman plays Professor Michael Armstrong, who is a nuclear-physics professor along on a ship, in the Norway area, gathering similar scientists who are having some kind of convention. (Newman strikes me as having a mumbly manner through various scenes in the film.) Julie Andrews is his fiancee, Sarah Sherman, who has come along with him. He doesn’t really want her along. For a To Catch a Thief splash, they make love (or semi–do so) in a cabin while everyone else is at breakfast in a freezing dining room. He gets a telegraph message. When he finally goes to recheck the message, he answers. He will meet someone at a bookstore in Copenhagen.

From a Copenhagen hotel, Sarah has managed to go to the bookstore herself. She is given a wrapped book. She meets Michael, and he takes the book and takes it to a men’s room. There, he finds a code in it—the Greek letter pi.

Later, the couple have lunch in an outdoor café (with horribly fake rear-projection background). She presses him on why he didn’t want her along. He says he has business in another city, and their pre-wedding business, etc., will have to wait. She is upset.

Later, when she inquires at a plane-ticket desk, first interested in following her husband to the Western city she assumes he is going to, where her husband is going, the clerk innocently tells her he’s going to East Berlin. She says, “But that’s behind the Iron Curtain!”

Bum-buh-da-bum!! In case you don’t know—and some doctor I spoke with back in the 1990s, amazingly, didn’t know the term—the “Iron Curtain” was a metaphor referring to the hard division between the West and the East Bloc. The phrase came from a speech by Winston Churchill in the early 1950s or so. (Hence the film’s hokey title: the Iron Curtain is being penetrated, “torn.” Ooooh, cool!) Why is Michael Armstrong going to the East Bloc?

In a letter scene in which they confront each other in a bedroom at the hotel, with Sarah disillusioned and indignant, and with Michael sheepish and excuse-making, he suggests he is defecting to the East. As various comments in the film make clear, a project he was working on for the federal government was an “anti-missile” program—recall the real-life “Star Wars” stuff that only really took off about 20 years later (in 1965 such an idea would have seemed pie-in-the-sky)—and Michael’s project was canceled. Michael suggests to Sarah he wants to work with people who really would want to pursue the project, in the East. Of course, this makes him look like a traitor to the U.S. and the West.

It is the combined anguish Sarah is put under both in terms of her planned marriage and in terms of the treason/defection issue that attracted Hitchcock to the story. As McGilligan says, and as the DVD extra says, the story of Burgess and McLean, two British-originating spies who defected in the early 1950s, fascinated Hitchcock, and he also wondered what their wives thought of their defecting.

This would seem a rich enough vein of story material, and of course the film has been criticized for how slick and un-connecting it is (see Leonard Maltin). It is a shallowly done film, but still is not so terrible for all that. Hitchcock was such a master of making a viewable “entertainment” out of all sorts of material that seeing his camera wend its way through this story, with the Europe-suggesting backgrounds and the interludes of intrigue, is interesting enough, even if the politics and science in this story are half-baked.

Various actors in the film, and little baubles of fun parts

Hitchcock didn’t only use as his two leads stars that seemed quite un-Hitchcockian. Newman took issue with the quality of the script, rightly enough, and seemed to rub Hitch the wrong way with his headstrongness. Meanwhile, Andrews herself—I mean, Mary Poppins as a Hitchcock heroine, ay gevalt!: I think we all agree…. She not only was paid an enormous amount, a huge percentage of the film’s overall budget (see McGilligan), but due to schedule, she only had a narrow window within which to film. Hence her acting seems sometimes half-baked (notice how bored she looks in the back of the taxi when they ride with Gromek after meeting at the East German state airport/security office).

But Hitch also used several European actors—similar to what he did in Topaz—while here they often stand out as colorful side characters.

Probably the main standout, or one of the top two or three, is Wolfgang Kieling, who plays Gromek, a man who is supposedly Michael’s assistant/guard provided by East German security but who is (no shock) really spying on him. Kieling in his usual career was a clean-faced studio vocalist for translation of Western stage works into German, but here he is a somewhat frumpy heavy. Not only is he the only one dressed somewhat caddishly in a heavy leather jacket, but he chews gum, and with his somewhat over-familiar big blue eyes, he has a somewhat irreverent way of being friendly (as he touches base with Michael on whether certain slang American terms are still used). He has a slight Peter Lorre air (the latter appearing as a heavy in, I believe, Hitch’s first The Man Who Knew Too Much). He often tries to light a cigarette with his lighter, which seems never to work.

Other standouts are Lila Kedrova, who plays a figuratively and literally colorful (in dress) character who meets up with Michael and Sarah on the street as they are trying to flee in the third act of the movie, and helps them out in return for encouraging them to become her sponsors to allow her to emigrate to the U.S. This actress, as the transient Countess Kutchinska, seems to ham it up a bit, and the camera lingers on her, and she is entertaining rather in the way Peter Sellers is in some of the Kubrick films he’s in, when he’s allowed to riff off on some comic foray. Kedrova’s scene seems to slow down the movie a bit, but she is such a colorful character that we can still indulge it.

My personal favorite among the foreign-born standouts is Ludwig Donath as Professor Gustav Lindt, whom Michael is trying to meet up with at the East Germany University where Lindt has his research chair. Lindt has figured out the formula for the “anti-missile missile” that Michael himself had been working on. Michael has to wangle the rest of the formula, which he himself couldn’t quite get, out of Lindt, and that under time pressure. He has earlier encountered Lindt in what was planned as an academic “hearing” of sorts; and they bond under the ostensible premise that they are merely to work together as colleagues in the same physics endeavor, with Michael understood as a permanent defector to the East. (As we find—and as Sarah, resolvingly for her, finds—Michael is really working as a spy for the U.S. to get the formula out of Lindt and escape East Germany, with the help of Pi—remember the Pi he saw in the book early in the film—which is a counter-Communist, underground organization in East Germany that already exists and now is specifically helping Michael, with the aid of a Western agent, who is posing as a farmer, played by none other than Mort Mills in campy mustache and with insouciant manner.)

Donath—who had been blacklisted—looks elderly and rather scruffy, but he brings to his character the comportment of an old academic with nothing left to prove, and a taste for dining while rather wolfishly comporting with attractive women (remember, this was the mid-1960s). He also engages in sly humor when reminding Michael he doesn’t talk about his work over a good drink, and practices masterly indirection in agreeing with Michael on how to meet the next morning to talk about their “anti-missile missile” work. Donath brings to his character a flavor of taking himself seriously for what (science) he does best, but being good-naturedly insouciant in the way of someone who is too old to really give a rat’s ass what a lot of people think about him anymore.  

The German flavor within this combo plate

To touch on a thing I appreciate personally: In about 1971, when I was young (age about nine), there were some mighty bizarre things in the world that stretched my young, slightly fearful understanding—such as how ex-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was said in the likes of Life magazine to have died a second time, when he really died in 1971. Trying to boil down an oddity, mediated by the American media, my mother clumsily explained that the Russians’ custom, or whatever, was that he had earlier “died” when he was exiled/such (this roughly recounts her comment); and the American media merely, and somewhat ironically, adopted this “died a second time” trope.

In the more humdrum area of everyday life, at school in third or fourth grade, we classmates had to come up with a dish representing our ethnic background, for some celebrate-ethnicities event. We also had to draw the flag of the country that was of our supposed background. So at the time my mother and I settled on our (my) ethnic background as German. This is ironic, considering a number of factors, including her own tough criticism of Germans over many, many years.

As for myself, I have long, long objected to the idea of identifying with any particular ethnic background, whether German or whatever else is in my background (such as English, French, and Dutch). I remember naively saying, when a group of us kids on the street were playing some weird game of revealing what our ethnic background was, in about 1969, “I'm an American.” I repeated this, with its semi-rhyming (and thus embarrassing) sound. And I have always believed that. For an American-born person, taking his role in this country seriously, to identify with an ethnic background from Europe strikes me as a peasant thing to do. [Clarification: This has to do, per my understanding of the terms, with ethnic groups, as opposed to races, which are defined by broader characteristics. Ethnic groups may apply to specific European (or other within-race) nationalities or the like; races are more like Black, white, Oriental, etc.]

But in those sad, bereft days of about 1971, in the wake of my father’s dying, we grasped German as the way to square with the school’s event. So, I was puzzled at what to do for the flag. There were two Germanys! (Why was that?) And there were two flags—and the better-looking one, to me, was East Germany’s! It had that compass thing in the middle. It sort of looked cool. Why was the West German flag—that of the “good guys”—so boring-looking by comparison?

And the food issue was weird. My mother asked my father’s mother, Gertrude (whose own husband had died in 1968)—and we called her O’ma, after the German custom—to give us a recipe for a German dish. O’ma came up with Swedish meatballs. (!) My mother followed the recipe—it was very involved, including use of condensed milk, I believe. That had to be brought to school, all made up and in covered dish.

In my eyes, it seemed a weird thing more generally to identify yourself as German. There were two countries, side by side, and two flags. And we in particular couldn’t even come up with an actual German food (this was more a passing family anomaly; O’ma actually did cook typical German foods like Kloss and Roladen). It just seemed alienating to “be German.” (And don’t get me started on seeing the old Germans in my family at gatherings—actually, a complex area including positive parts…. But ever since then, I kind of make fun of German and Eastern European ways of talking, out of a sort of fondness, humor, whatever else….)

In the milieu represented by the movie, not only are the East German functionaries represented as, if handsome, rather efficient and remote, but their world seems like a coolly industrialized place, hemmed in by fear, rising intrepidly out of sooty ruins. In the scene in the office of the security chief (played by Hansjoerg Felmy), in the painted background, you can see what looks like war-ruined buildings. And indeed, the ghost of World War II still hung over things. (Of course, a fair amount of Europe still had lingering WWII ruins for years. And, glimpsing a different part of the world, even in The Beatles’ Anthology tapes, when you see film of Japan or the Philippines from 1966, it seems there’s a certain paranoid regimentation to things, as if they feared another massive war starting before long.)

I get amused seeing the German actors in TC go through their roles (they seem to meet their acting demands better than Newman and Andrews sometimes meet theirs). The gabbled-out German language in the background in some scenes is good for some warmhearted mockery in my imagination (you might say, What music would these people boogie to? Kraftwerk, with their single “Trans-Europe Express”? That was still 12 years in the future.)

So this film, as hokey as it is, does bring back an old (45-year-old) world, if you have the real-life frame of reference to link to it in your memory.

The murder of Gromek, and the music situation

One thing that gets noted about this film is that its most Hitchcockian scene is the death of Gromek. Michael ends up killing Gromek, who has followed him to a flatland farmhouse (giving the film a fleeting flavor of North by Northwest) where Michael was to get his next instructions from a representative of Pi. Gromek has seen Michael’s having written the letter pi in the dirt outside the house, and is about to report him to state security. Michael grabs him….

And becomes incompetent about killing him. The woman who is the ostensible farm housewife (probably a member of Pi) anguishedly helps him out. The scene goes on at a little length, but is reminiscent of the shower scene in Psycho, and to me is more palatable an echo of that scene than the ugly rape scene in Frenzy. Also, the TC scene has no music scored under it.

Not that it couldn’t have. Bernard Herrmann was originally to score the film, and did come up with music. This was the flashpoint where Hitchcock and Herrmann famously parted ways, ending an especially richly symbiotic career confluence. Hitchcock was under pressure from Universal to provide a more youth-oriented score. By the movie production time, 1965-66, The Beatles and other British invasion bands, along with American rock groups, were a big cultural determiner. If you listen to some of the fan talk on various items in The Beatles’ Anthology videos and the ~1994 Apple Records tape of the BBC radio shows they did in the early 1960s, it seems some fans could use no word more incisive to capture what they liked about the music than that it had a “beat-y” sound. Plus, the James Bond films had a sort of rock inflection in the guitar-including soundtrack music they had.

To meet market demands, Hitchcock apparently told Bernard Herrmann that the music had to feature a “beat” aspect. Now, just about any reader of this would know that these men were too much of an older generation to know just what, musically, this entailed, much less to really enjoy or be an adherent of it.

(This despite the fact that Herrmann, whose music is so obviously in the language of classical, with its use of orchestral instruments for so many ways to suggest mood, also featured a lot of repetition—repeated figures—such as in some of his most famous scores, like those for Vertigo and Psycho. Listen to these closely and note how he uses stringed instruments [or a broader array of orchestral instruments] to play repeated figures, which is key to supporting suspense for a movie. But this repeating method also is similar to the obsessive repetition of such rock acts as Led Zeppelin, with the repeated figures, underscored by Jimmy Page’s rhythm guitar work, in the single “Whole Lotta Love” or the songs “Four Sticks” and “Misty Mountain Hop” on the group’s untitled fourth album.)

Herrmann’s score for TC featured parts that were simplified, and repeated notes or chords—his way of providing “beat-y” music. But it also sounded very Herrmann-like. Hitchcock snapped off the sample of the score he heard, and Herrmann was fired. John Addison became the composer to score Torn Curtain—and I think many agree that it is the weakest score of almost any Hitchcock movie. (See end of next subsection, "A turning point....")

On the DVD of this movie, you are offered a sampling of scenes with Herrmann’s score—apparently newly recorded for the DVD—underlaid. And voila—the music actually makes the scenes seem more typically Hitchcockian, even with Julie Andrews’ fresh-scrubbed face, like a second-grade teacher’s, on screen. There is a darkness, an atmosphere of “sinister stuff afoot,” conveyed by the Herrmann music, which might have made the film a little better than it is considered. But the Universal suits wanted to appeal to young audiences, and the film has the Addison score, including in the initial title sequence a sort of low-register guitar part that seems to echo James Bond music.

The real test of whether Herrmann would have been better for TC concerns the murder-of-Gromek scene. In the DVD’s making-of extra, there is a comparison offering that shows you that not only had Herrmann provided a score for the murder scene, but so had Addison. The Herrmann music seems more classically Hitchcock, and puts the scene relatively on a level with the shower scene in Psycho—but with fancier music than was in the Psycho scene. (Hitch had initially thought the Psycho shower scene could go without music, but his following Herrmann’s suggestion of using the screeching violins and then the gothic minor chords afterward has sealed this as one of the iconic horror scenes of all time.)

The Addison score itself, for the Gromek murder scene (which the DVD extra samples), isn’t too bad—it does suggest the darkness/danger of what is going on. It actually almost equals the Herrmann music for “monstrous mood” music.

But Hitchcock ended up not using any music for the scene—it plays out with just the sounds in the room. The pictorial editing is sharp enough. You do get an energizing sense of suspense from the scene, but it also seems a little ludicrous or self-consciously comical at times—which is perhaps what Hitchcock wanted.

A turning point for Hitchcock

This film represented a turning point for Hitchcock not only in his severing work relations with Herrmann, but his longtime editor George Tomasini died in 1964, and his director of photography Robert Burks would die in 1968, but after having worked on Marnie, among many other of Hitchcock’s films for which he did cinematography (and for the reason McGilligan suggests of his not being right for TC's "flavor"--p. 682, footnote), he did not work on Torn Curtain. Meanwhile, the production designer for TC was Hein Heckroth, not the likes of Henry Bumstead who had worked on a film like Vertigo.

[Added] As far as Herrmann is concerned, a telegraph quoted from in Dan Auiler, Hitchcock's Notebooks: An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Avon, 1999), p. 525, shows Hitchcock articulating to Herrmann the type of audience he had to square with, as he apparently was directed to do by Universal: "This audience is very different from the one to which we used to cater[;] it is young[,] vigorous[,] and demanding[.] [...] It is this fact that has been recognized by almost all of the European film makers [sic] where they have sought to introduce a beat and a rhythm that is [sic] more in tune with the requirements of the aforesaid audience[.]" 

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End note 1. Patrick McGilligan, in Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (New York: ReganBooks, 2003), pp. 545-46. In 1957, prior to the production of Vertigo, Hitchcock suffered trouble from his navel hernia; then he had to have gallstone removal; there were other problems. He was hospitalized or limited to bed rest at home for four months. Subsequent references to health issues of Hitchcock’s in my text will cite only the page numbers from McGilligan, starting with “McG.”

End note 2. See McGilligan, pp. 666-67, for Hitchcock’s remarks on how Hollywood and its products had become determined by, and answerable to, accountants, agents, and the like. See pp. 663-64 on how even Lew Wasserman, Hitchcock’s longtime agent and now (certainly by 1965) chief of Universal, wanted Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, both bankable stars and the latter “hot” at the time, to be used in the next Hitchcock film—conforming with Hollywood’s hewing to a more star-driven formula. Hitchcock chafed at this expectation (p. 664).

Interestingly, Wasserman, according to McGilligan, wanted Torn Curtain to have the Paramount flavor of Hitchcock’s best efforts, and even one or more of its main stars thought he was trying for a Notorious (1946; pre-Paramount) flavor. How TC seems to ape this style a bit, yet fall quite flat, is one of the more obvious things about it.

End note 3. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

End note 4. Along with market concerns, on a friendlier level, the times were a-changing in such a way for Hitchcock as this: maybe trivially, he became involved with film professionals (who in one way or another addressed the prerogatives of younger American audiences) in the following ways (and there are plenty of other such ways, I guess, that someone more expert than I can ferret out): Gilbert Taylor (who just died this August 2013 at age 99) was his director of photography for Frenzy, and was the same as worked with Roman Polanski on some of the latter’s earlier films, including Macbeth (1971?; this also starred Jon Finch, who starred in Frenzy). Taylor had also worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove (1964), and would even be the cinematographer for Star Wars (1977) and The Omen (1976). Also, the screenwriter for Frenzy, Anthony Shaffer, is the same man who penned the script for The Wicker Man (1973), which I did a blog entry on in winter 2012. But this all may be to say that it was mere coincidence that Hitchcock, involved in the industry as long as he was, couldn’t help but overlap occasionally with professionals, well established already, who somehow found a way to work to young-audience tastes in a way he himself couldn’t really.

End note 5. Views differ on how much of a failure this was, a good bit. The relatively recent DVD of Torn Curtain has a making-of doc that says Marnie was both a critical and commercial “failure.” But McGilligan says that Marnie ended up in the black, and even did better than Vertigo (p. 655). And yet, while the Torn Curtain DVD suggests TC did well, all indications are that Hitchcock felt TC did unremarkably enough that he was willing to try the spy genre again with Topaz in 1968-69. Certainly critical consensus after almost 50 years is that Torn Curtain is among Hitch’s lesser efforts (see, for example, the Leonard Maltin compendium).

For further reading: Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983).