Topaz
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DVD details
Actor: John Forsythe, Karin Dor, Per-Axel Arosenius, Roscoe Lee Browne, Tina Hedstr?mPrimary Contributor: Dany Robin
Primary Contributor: Frederick Stafford
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 143 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-03-06
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of Topaz
DVD Review: Who's on first?
Summary: 4 Stars
As so many people are I'm a Hitchcock fan. For some reason I've never seen this movie before. What a treat to happen upon an old friend in new clothes! This movie is based on Leon Uris' Cold War/Bay of Pigs novel of the same name. Agents and double agents, people changing allegiances, no way to tell who's telling the truth or even why they're saying and doing things. The photography (as is almost always true with Hitchcock) is startling. He does an omniscient thing by photographing from above so often interspersed with his signature WAY too close up shots. I was most struck by the actor who played Deveraux. I haven't read Uris' book so I'm not sure what his intent was but there doesn't seem to be any one character who you feel completely sympathetic with so it was hard to feel fully `present'. Not one of Hitchcock's best movie but hey, it's still Hitchcock. DVD 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 attach? 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 attach? 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 attach? 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
DVD 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.DVD 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.
DVD Review: terrible
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm a fan of Hitchcock and have seen most of his films. I missed Topaz when it came out, so I borrowed the VHS tape. What a waste of time! This is the worst Hitchcock film I've ever seen and one of the worst films ever.
This is nominally a spy thriller, but at every point where suspense is possible, Hitch defuses the thrills. There's way too much talk, and the few action scenes are predictable and flat. The tradecraft is unbelievable: what intelligence officer waits across the street while his operative waves to him and then walks into a hotel filled with Cubans?
The actors are wooden and glum, with the exception of Phillipe Noiret, who manages to inject his character with some shades of feeling.
It feels like a bad propaganda film, one made by the State Department to warn the Russians that we're serious about the Monroe Doctrine.
Description of Topaz
Alfred Hitchcock hadn't made a spy thriller since the 1930s, so his 1969 adaptation of Leon Uris's bestseller seemed like a curious choice for the director. But Hitchcock makes Uris's story of the West's investigation into the Soviet Union's dealings with Cuba his own. Frederick Stafford plays a French intelligence agent who works with his American counterpart (John Forsythe) to break up a Soviet spy ring. The film is a bit flat dramatically and visually, and there are sequences that seem to occupy Hitchcock's attention more than others. A minor work all around, with at least two alternative endings shot by Hitchcock. --Tom KeoghEspionage DVDs
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