Word: hitchcocked
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...sitting in the Harvard Square watching the newest Hitchcock and this dreadful Cold War rhetoric begins falling on you from the screen. Fine, you think, I'm on top of it: Hitchcock is senile so the spirit of Leon Uris is shining through. But all manner of neat details begin to make themselves felt. The movie gets to the defector's new house in Alexandria and suddenly all the CIA men are obnoxious boors, the Russian has thrice their intelligence and cock has departed from the heavy-handed moralism of the script to work ironically against...
...more existential variety and less emotional intensity than any of his previous films. New people and places follow each other, evoking scant reaction from the hero and his closest associates. The film has at least four beginnings and endings, but its characters do not change in the slightest. Hitchcock does not even motivate their actions...
...educate his audience as much as confirm their existent prejudices. A Jesus Saves sign looms briefly out poor Rod Taylor's window. Here I air a prejudice of my own. I would rather have my symbols built openly into a-film's structure (like Hitchcock's Tonight Golden Carls sign in The Lodger, or Hawks's The World is Yours-Cook's Tours sign in Scarface ), than hold or pan-away from lurid urban graphics as Antonioni too often does...
Stunningly introduced, running breathlessly toward the camera in a frame worthy of romantically-inclined Hitchcock, Daria (Daria Halprin) represents for Antonioni semi-dormant awareness of the imperfect world she inhabits. A hippie girl who condescends to establishment employment when she "needs bread," this Antonioni heroine is a creature of fashion: she smokes grass (in contrast with Mark's ascetic "reality trip"), plays music on her radio rather than strike bulletins, and tends to pacify her frustrations and desires by retreating into claborate fantasies. An occasional line suggests that these fantasies are standard-operating-procedure. Mark speaks of the group...
...master has made such points in films from Foreign Correspondent to Torn Curtain. But at 70, Hitchcock seems suddenly to have forgotten his own recipe. Topaz contains no chills, no fever-and most disappointing, no entertainment. By the finale, the predictability of every turn and the grossness of the heroes and villains recall the old gag about the espionage agent who whispered a code message to a locked door. "Wrong apartment," came the reply. "I'm Ginsberg the tailor. You want Ginsberg the spy, upstairs...