Word: topaz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...would call them Topaz. It would seem difficult to make a zombie from Leon Uris' tense bestseller, based on diplomatic crescendos leading up to the Cuban missile crisis. Yet Alfred Hitchcock has done so without any discernible effort, spiritlessly following the events to their evitable inconclusion...
...French spy, Andre Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), is employed by American intelligence to venture into Cuba. He emerges with evidence of Russian rockets, but in the process abets the deaths of cooperative peasants, patriots and his old inamorata (Karin Dor). Kiss-of-death Devereaux returns to Paris with another revelation: Topaz is the code name for quislings in the De Gaulle Cabinet. They too are rooted out, to perish ignominiously...
...TOPAZ. Alfred Hitchcock's newest film is hardly his most entertaining or suspenseful work, but still it stands as a monument to the vision, brilliance and sheer force of America's greatest working director. Hitchcock's visual narrative and moral stance dominate the picture from first shot to last-so much so, that one is oblivious to plot inanities inherited from the Leon Uris novel and the largely clodlike performances of the cast (Michacl Piccoli, Philippe Noirct and Rocoe Lee Browne excluded...
Throughout, Topaz is resolutely anti-political. The finale, when shots of all the dead heroes and villains are superimposed on a newspaper bearing the headline "Cuban Missile Crisis Over" ends with that newspaper being discarded on a park bench. In other words. Hitchcock says "so what?" to the entire enterprise. (The film is amusing in that...
Playwright Samuel Taylor wrote Topaz's unimportant screenplay, and Maurice Jarre composed the nifty musical score...