![]() Narrative (Karin Dor as a beautiful anti-Castro Cuban who is shot for her efforts and collapses onto a marble floor, her body framed by the brilliant purple of her dress). The people one remembers are those who are employed for the effect of their looks (John Vernon as a bearded Castro aide with brilliant blue eyes, Carlos Rivas as his bodyguard, a Cuban with remarkably red hair), or who are bequeathed vivid images by the Dany Robin,Ĭast as Stafford's worried wife, and Claude Jade, who was so lovely in Truffaut's "Stolen Kisses," and who here plays Stafford's worried daughter, frown quite a lot. John Stafford, who plays a Washington-based French intelligence man (and is more or less the lead), and John Forsythe, his counterpart in the Central Intelligence Agency, have all the panache of well-tailored salesmen of electrical appliances. Most of its performers are, if not entirely unknown, so completely subordinate to their roles that they seem, perhaps unfairly, quite forgettable. Hitchcock, who can barely tolerate actors, has been especially self-indulgent in the casting of "Topaz." The film has no one on the order of James Stewart or Cary Grant on which to depend, although it does use someįine character actors (Michel Piccoli, Phillipe Noiret) in small roles. "Pieta," only it's not a Mother holding her dead Son, but a middle-aged Cuban wife holding her dead husband, after they've been tortured in a Castro prison. "Topaz" is, however, quite pure Hitchcock, a movie of beautifully composed sequences, full of surface tensions, ironies, absurdities (some hungry seagulls blow the cover of two Allied agents), as well as of odd references to things such as Michaelangelo's ![]() Pretty much where they started, except that they are older, tired and a little less capable of being happy. Being pressed, I'd say that it's aboutĮspionage as a kind of game, set in Washington, Havana and Paris at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, involving a number of dedicated people in acts of courage, sacrifice and death, after which the survivors find themselves It's rather too leisurely and the machinations of the plot rather too convoluted to be easily summed up in anything except a very loose sentence. "Topaz" is not a conventional Hitchcock film. The Russian's only comment to the proud C.I.A. Soviet official and his family aboard an American plane headed for Wiesbaden. Is virtuoso Hitchcock, beginning with a dazzling, single-take pan shot outside the Soviet Embassy, then detailing the flight, pursuit through, among other things, a ceramics factory and the final safe arrival of the irritable The sequence, which lasts approximately 10 minutes and uses only a minimum of dialogue, ![]() Hitchcock sets his scene in a first act that dramatizes the defection of a high Soviet intelligence officer to C.I.A. Was based on a real-life espionage scandal that kept both sides of the Atlantic busy in 1962. "Topaz," the code name for a Russian spy ring within the French Government, is the film adaptation of the Leon Uris novel, which itself Of "Topaz," the film that opened yesterday at the Cinerama Theater. T's perfectly apparent from its opening sequence that no one except Alfred Hitchcock, the wise, round, supremely confident storyteller, is in charge
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