Topaz
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Movie Reviews of Topaz
Movie Review: Topaz
Summary: 5 Stars
A great Hitchcock film. It's the supposed effort of one French intelligence
man & the US to expose the Russian missile buildup in Cuba in 1962. The mix of fact & fiction is seamless. I found it to be entertaining & full of twists & turns that kept me on the edge of my seat. Hitchcock in top form.
Movie Review: Great Hitchcock
Summary: 5 Stars
Great Hitchcock film reminding me of how things have changed as well as not changed with governments and the world.Movie Review: And Cuba is still standing, France too.
Summary: 4 Stars
After the cold war in East Germany in "Torn Curtain", Hitchcock had to deal with the big bad wolf, the USSR. And he did in this film, though it concerns more Washington and France, but only a little bit Cuba and practically not at all the USSR, directly at least since the bad guy is the USSR. We are in October 1962. A top KGB official defects to the USA and reveals a few things, but little, about Cuba. He confirms at least something is happening in Cuba. Hitchcock finds it funny to insist on the incompetence and impotence of the Americans, and particularly the CIA. That's the first remark from the KGB fleeing official. But it is shown in length. They are obliged to go through a French secret agent in Washington to get the information they want, including the pictures of his mission to Cuba for surveillance of the Russian deliveries. And it is funny how the French commercial attaché of the French embassy is going to use his connection with another French agent from the French West Indies to approach the necessary person in the Cuban delegation to the United Nations General Assembly to get a copy of the agreement between the USSR and Cuba. And he will then go to Cuba himself to get the hard photographic data he needs. What is surprising is not the fact that some French secret service people helped the USA at a time when they could not get what they wanted, in 1962 when the world was on the brink of a nuclear war. What is funny is that this film comes four years after the decision by General de Gaulle to kick NATO out of France, and one year after the famous 1968 events and in fact the year when General de Gaulle resigned from power in the spring of 1969. The film was made in 1969. The film was released in the USA only on December 19, 1969 and mostly in 1970 for Europe. It shows how without the French the missile crisis in Cuba would not have been solved by John F. Kennedy, a recollection that goes against the strong campaign against General de Gaulle and France in 1969 due to the strong opposition General de Gaulle took against the Vietnam war in 1967 and 1968, including his famous speech in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, shortly before Nixon sent US troops into that country. But the film has another interest in the title and what it means: a spying ring directly in the French government at top level of specialists and technical executives, just under ministerial positions. That ring called Topaz was spying in the French government and NATO for the USSR. The film shows how the poor commercial attaché is mixed in the doings of that ring without knowing at first and then knowing and trying to expose the ring and the men, but expose them within the very power structure of France, which is the way things are done in France: keep everything within the family circle and let's wash our dirty laundry in private. They even let the top rung of that ring leave for the Soviet Union when the whole business is finished and the commercial attaché is sent back to Washington from where he had been called back. There Hitchcock is becoming in a way funny, scary too, but definitely funny. The French and their little love affairs, and their little private luncheons and dinners, the French and their republican aristocratic dealings and etiquette, and of curse their cute eighteenth and nineteenth century houses and mansions in Paris, these places you hardly see behind their majestic facades. And Hitchcock even uses well-known French actors from the 1968-1969 period and makes them speak English with a very elaborate English French accent, far away from the French accent we all associate with camembert, red wine and bread baguette, but that has all to do with fluent English spoken by bilingual French individuals. Maurice Chevalier's out. It's that humor that is funny, both strange and ah ah. But with time I am afraid it has aged and is more nostalgic, for those who can remember, than really active today. Though Cuba is still there and still standing in its revolutionary shoes, though pretty worn out and being renovated as fast as possible, in these days when all the ex-Maoist and ex-Soviet guerrilla or open warfare movements like the Tamil Tigers, the FARCs and the Nepali Maoists are moving out of the violent terrorist picture and eventually back into the political and economic vaster democratic picture, and Russia is definitely still trying to put the Soviet boots back on and rebuild their past glory and power. The great change is that China is the potential first economic power in the world and that they have decided to associate quite a few people with them in that new role. We might finally reach a real multi-polar world twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain and of the dual-divide across the big global cake.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Movie Review: Back from the dead.
Summary: 4 Stars
The reasessment of Hitchcock's 1960's work continues, begun with the amazing Marnie. (Torn Curtain may be a lost cause, however.) It's fair to say that Topaz benefits from this ongoing reconsideration. It's just a very good movie.
The plot follows an episodic but compelling arc along the trail of French cold-war spy leaks. A number of satisfying (and inter-twining) sub-stories among the large cast are well presented. The parallel infidelities of the Stafford/Robin husband and wife are interesting and key to ultimate plot resolution. Some very nice "set pieces" are included, the tent poles that support Hitchcock movies. I found the location photography to be both realistic and refreshing. The film's main fault, of course, is the absence of a convincing ending. How Hitch believed that the "duel" ending would stand up is beyond me. I'm not sure how Uris ended his book.
Jarre's music is almost laughable, certainly in comparison with the monumental Herrmann. Topaz is a serious movie about serious themes (betrayal, good versus evil) and Jarre's music does nothing to advance these themes.
Finally, Leonard Maltin's commentary touches powerfully on Hitchcock's directorial powers, the likes of which are few and far-between these days. Outside of maybe Soderberg and Tykwer, most modern-day directors have little idea of where to place the camera, how to sequence images through cutting, et al. (Poster child of directorial ineptitude is Ron Howard who absolutely doesn't have a clue.) Suffice it to say that Topaz is a very well directed movie that delivers visual style and meaning in spades.
Movie Review: excellent cold war caper set in Cuba, NYC, and Paris
Summary: 4 Stars
This is an odd film, but definitely one of the better ones of his late 60s efforts. The pace is slow, there are no big stars, it is embedded in a historical drama related to real events, i.e. the Cuban missile crisis. There is also an array of excellent French actors, who speak only in heavily accented English. Nonetheless, it is a very good film, if not a great one.
The main character is a French intelligence operative, who operates in close cooperation with the CIA and is a kind of maverick. He is extremely good at what he does and has a system of his own operatives and collaborators set up. As he gets involved in an investigation at the behest of the CIA, he comes into contact with crude Cuban revolutionaries (one of them finds a diplomatic dispatch wrapped around a half-eaten hamburger), uses an affair to get information about Russian missile placements in Cuba, and then fights to find a conspiracy (and at the same time save his career) in Paris. He operates in environments that mix elegant style with the saddest brutalities and constant threats, often humorously portrayed.
As always, the details and imagery are quirky, unusual, and unexpected. While the plot is a bit pedestrian, the intrigue and off-hand humor are wonderful.
Recommended. Not Hitch's best, but the best of his late efforts.
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