Topaz
by Alfred Hitchcock
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Actor: Dany Robin, Frederick Stafford, John Vernon, Karin Dor, Michel PiccoliDirector: Alfred Hitchcock
Brand: NBC Universal
Cinematographer: Jack Hildyard
Producer: Alfred Hitchcock
Editor: William H. Ziegler
Producer: Herbert Coleman
Writer: Leon Uris
Writer: Samuel A. Taylor
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 143 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-06-20
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of Topaz
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 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
Description of Topaz
The best-selling spy novel bursts onto the screen in this riveting story of adventure and international intrigue. John Forsythe stars as an American CIA agent who hires a French operative (Frederick Stafford) to travel to Cuba and investigate rumors of Russian missiles and Topaz, a NATO spy. The inquiry soon spins into a life-threatening escapade of espionage, betrayal and murder. Starring: John Forsythe, Frederick Stafford, Dany Robin, John Vernon, Karin Dor, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret, Claude Jade, Michel Subor, Per-Axel Arosenius, Roscoe Lee Browne Directed by: Alfred HitchcockBestsellers in DVD
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