Word: newman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...chase that Hitchcock milks for suspense fails because the audience's attention is allowed to wander from the heroes, Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, to the previously unseen leader of an underground group. Also, the suspense menace (another pursuing bus) is not made convincingly menacing. The climactic theatre sequence where Newman and Andrews avoid the East Berlin police by creating a fire disturbance shows Hitchcock efficiently going through his paces--he has filmed variations of the same scene in four earlier pictures--but without his usual inventiveness. The final ocean-liner scene, where the fleeing physicists are found hiding...
Torn Curtain takes Hitchcock into new territory. With the first scene between Newman and Andrews, Hitchcock establishes their love affair as stabler and healthier than those in his previous films. The love scene is composed entirely of close-ups of them together. But almost immediately, by using out-of-focus camerawork and contrasting their points-of-view in his editing, Hitchcock begins to separate them visually, to put strain on the stability of their relationship...
...premise is finally revealed: without telling Andrews, physicist Newman plans to stage a mock defection to East Berlin to pry a formula from the brain of a Communist physicist, a formula necessary for the completion of Newman's own missile project. It becomes apparent that Hitchcock will use the nightmare world of East Berlin to test the lovers. Like many of his recent films, Torn Curtain is essentially a romantic character study, a realization that adds to the excellence of the first half of the film...
...Torn Curtain ultimately fails because the conflicts between Newman and Andrews are neatly resolved at the halfway mark. Once Newman has his formula, Torn Curtain becomes blatant chase melodrama. There is no more characterization and the emphasis switches from Newman and Andrews to the supporting characters involved in the escape from East Berlin: the leader of the Resistance bus, a Polish ex-countess with problems, a villainous ballerina...
...continues in Torn Curtain to experiment with visual romanticism: Julie Andrews is chastized by Newman on an airplane and as she lowers her head sadly, the camera while dissolving to the next scene begins to blur, as if tears were clouding the lens. Suddenly Hitchcock cuts sharply to the airplane door loudly opening, revealing the East Berlin airport. It is an unnerving return to reality, a visual refusal to give his heroine any means of escape...