Classic Movie Review: Hitchcock's Exhausting 'Torn Curtain'

On the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast we’ve been exploring the work of Alfred Hitchcock of late, specifically his less remembered catalog. A few weeks ago, we were rightly appalled by the misogyny and dimwitted pop psychology of his Marnie, starring the recently departed Sean Connery. This week, November 29th, with Paul Newman starring in one of our featured movies of 1990, the crazy terrible Mr and Mrs Bridge, we decided to take the opportunity to watch Newman work with Hitchcock in 1966’s Torn Curtain.

Torn Curtain stars Paul Newman as Professor Michael Armstrong and the lovely Julie Andrews as his assistant, and fiancee, Sarah Sherman. The two are attending a physics conference in some foreign locale when Paul receives a strange message from a local bookstore. The message contains instructions for a meeting that Michael has that he doesn’t want Sarah to know about. Naturally, she finds out and is puzzled.

Michael then tells her that he must leave her behind for another engagement, one that will mean that he is skipping his headline speech at the conference. She’s shocked by this and becomes so upset that she plans to return to America without him. However, after intercepting a message for Michael, she finds out that he’s actually headed to Communist controlled West Berlin. Wanting to know what Michael is up to, Sarah buys a ticket to West Berlin for herself.

Upon arrival, Sarah is shocked to find that Michael is being met at the airport by press and photographers. At this point, he’s spotted her and is angrily trying to get her to find her way back onto a plane out of Berlin. Michael is in West Berlin to defect and join up with the Communist government in order to continue work on a project of his that the American government cut off the funding for. Michael hopes to work with their top scientist to complete the project.

Naturally, this is all a ruse. Michael does want to finish his project but his aim is to first keep the Russians from completing the same discovery that he’d made before his funding had been cut. Michael is a spy and Sarah choosing to join Michael in West Berlin against his wishes has thrown a big wrench in his plan to get in quietly, complete his mission, and make a hasty escape across the border back to the good side of the Iron Curtain.

From there, we get a series of tension filled scenes where Michael attempts to outsmart the communists to achieve his mission and then the exciting chase to the escape. These scenes involve luck and timing and the kinds of shenanigans that Hitchcock does very well. Hitchcock was always incredibly smart about creating tension within individual scenes, creating inescapable scenarios that his characters must escape using only their wits.

Torn Curtain thrives in these scenes early on and yet, there is a good reason why Torn Curtain isn’t beloved in the way North by Northwest or Psycho remain today. Torn Curtain moves very quickly from exciting and suspenseful to exhausting as Hitchcock attempts to up the ante on every scene. The escape sequence ups the ante on Michael and Sarah’s escape so many times that it becomes less suspenseful and more tiresome. That’s a tough thing to say about a Hitchcock movie, but I can’t deny it, the constantly escalating odds simply wore me out.

The final two big escapes in Torn Curtain are so unrelentingly over the top in the way the odds are stacked and the convenient leaps in logic are used to create them, that I began to zone out. Paul Newman does well to sell the peril of these characters while Julie Andrews is basically luggage, almost quite literally, for the final 20 minutes of the movie. I was rooting for the characters to escape, of course, but I never bought into the notion that they could escape given the odds stacked against them.

Instead of being thrilling, the final moments of Torn Curtain are more akin to the end of a marathon where you collapse at the end and thank whatever higher power you pray to that it is finally over. What should have been exciting is instead wearying and what I had hoped would be a hidden gem in the filmography of a beloved master director, turns out to be a lesser light in his work for a very good reason.

Torn Curtain is the classic on the November 29th edition of the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast. Listen in to find out whether my co-host Bob Zerull agrees with my assessment or if he found Torn Curtain to be the hidden gem that I had been hoping it would be. Follow us on Twitter @criticspod.