The worst of Hitchcock's two cold war movies made in the mid-60s, this film was based on a big best selling beach read by Leon Uris - one of those ripped from the headlines things about the secret shenanigans behind the Cuban missile crisis, filled with as much intrigue between the sheets as behind the doors of the embassies... and a cast of thousands. And the major problem with TOPAZ is probably with the source material's scope. Novels are an entirely different medium than screenplays and the movies that come from them. There are many things that you can do in a novel that just don't work in a movie. A movie is viewed all in one gulp and we expect the story needs to flow and the pieces connected to each other. Usually the audience does what I call the “skin jump” where they imagine themselves as the lead character and live the story on screen vicariously. They imagine they are James Bond or Indiana Jones or Neo from THE MATRIX or the character looking for love in a romantic comedy.
A book is a completely different animal – though there are books that you might read in one gulp, for the most part books are read chapter-by-chapter and we put a book marker in and set it aside. We may take days or weeks or even months to read a single book. So the focus is often on the *chapters* rather than the overall story. Even if a chapter ends with a cliff-hanger, it also usually works as a self-contained unit, giving us someplace to put a book mark and set the book aside. Due to the way the story is delivered to us – chapter by chapter – a book can be episodic and doesn't need to be from the protagonist's point of view. Because we can “get into a character's head” it is easier for us to identify with everyone, even the antagonist. We can bounce from character to character without ever being pulled out of the story. So the problem with adapting some novels is that they work so much differently than a movie works that our best set is probably just to toss the book and just run with the concept... or just leave it as a book. Some things are more at home in the medium they were created in.
The big problem with TOPAZ is that there is no lead character - it bounces back and forth between characters - so most of the scenes “star” minor characters that we haven't really gotten to know. The tone also works against it – a “ripped from the headlines” story often plays like a “just the facts” documentary, which means low key drama and less focus on emotions and drama. Combine that tone with no lead character to identify with and we end up with a story that was probably exciting in book form but ends up dull on screen. The screenplay is by Sam Taylor who wrote VERTIGO, but his skill set may not have been able to tame this all- over-the-place novel. The film just isn't very good...
Experiment: A big one! The film actually has four plots - and each is like its own little story. This film paved the way for movies like PULP FICTION. Different lead characters in each story with some overlapping characters who show up in more than one story, and one character who connects all four. It's a great experiment that probably comes directly from the novel's structure – but like most experiments, it fails. But let's look at it anyway, since PULP FICTION shows that it *can* work. Here are the four stories...
In Denmark: A top ranking Russian and his family defect to the USA.
In the USA: While the Cuban delegation is in town, secret documents are photographed that hint at Russian missiles sent to Cuba.
In CUBA: Spies find the Russian missiles.
In FRANCE: A high level spy ring in the French government is exposed.
Wow, that seems almost linear and not nearly as complicated as the movie is.
Anthology films like PULP FICTION contain more than one story, so the whole thing can't be broken up into the traditional three acts because the over-all story is actually a collection of smaller stories. Other anthology films include the horror anthology ASYLUM and the dramatic anthology O. HENRY'S FULL HOUSE, the Neil Simon comedy PLAZA SUITE and Ray Bradbury's weird tales anthology THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, not to mention Stephen King's horror anthology CAT'S EYE.
These are collections of short stories all with a similar genre or writer... but there's something else holding all the pieces together. A thematic structure that connects the stories.
Your anthology is usually going to have some sort of a common theme. A collection of short stories is collected for some reason. If you are a famous writer like Stephen King or Neil Simon, that might be a good enough excuse to lump a bunch of stories onto the same reel of film. Even if you *are* a famous writer, why are these stories all in the same collection and other stories not? In TOPAZ the stories are connected because they are all part of an over-all story in the same way an anthology movie like ASYLUM where the new psychiatrist at a mental institution interviews each of his murdered predecessor's last patients to see if he can figure out which one is the killer. Even though each segment is it's own self-contained story, they are also part of a larger story. In TOPAZ each of the four stories has a beginning and middle and end, but each is also a piece of a larger story. That story doesn't really have a traditional beginning-middle-end... In fact, Hitchcock ended up filming three different endings to TOPAZ and the test audiences hated every single one of them, forcing him to cobble together and ending from the footage on the cutting room floor.
An anthology film may be exploring love after divorce, or people facing their own mortality, or maybe flawed people searching for redemption like PULP FICTION. Each story usually explores the theme, showing different aspects of the theme or different characters struggling with elements of the theme. Basically, you are exploring the theme of redemption or mortality through different stories. One of the problems with TOPAZ is that there is no theme connecting all of the stories, so we just have some minor threads of one story's plot that just happen to connect to the next story's plot – and sometimes those threads aren't very strong.
Remember, the more specific you can be about what your theme is, the deeper you can explore it. If your theme is "love" you won't be digging as deep into the subject as if your theme is "first love" or "the end of love" or "the love of my life" or "second chances at love" or "love hurts" or "love is blind" or... well, love is a vast subject. Figure out what theory about love you want to explore in your stories and then come up with different stories that explore that theory. The PULP FICTION stories are a great example...
The first story with Travolta and Uma - what happens?
The second story with Bruce Willis as the boxer - what happens?
The third story with Travolta and Jackson and Harvey Keitel - what happens?
Now let's look at the wrap around - what is Samuel L. Jackson's life plan?
See how all four deal with issues of redemption? The problem with TOPAZ is the four stories above have no thematic connection... except maybe a character who sends another character to do something dangerous that may result in their death. Um, not as uplifting as a search for redemption. In fact, kind of off-putting. When you add that to the episodic nature of the story and the lack of a protagonist and we end up with something that is really hard to get into and really hard to like.
Okay, now let's take away Sam Jackson and Bruce Willis and John Travolta from PULP FICTION and replace them with unemotional and uncharismatic and mostly unknown actors. When a star plays a role, for good or for bad, their baggage comes with them. Though Travolta and Jackson play *killers* - both are charming guys who usually play roles that we like or admire (or are just bad-asses in the case of Jackson) so we instantly buy into them. We have liked them in past roles, so we like them in PULP FICTION the moment they walk into frame. But when Frederick Stafford (who?) walks into frame, we have no idea who the hell he is and he has to “earn” our identification... and in TOPAZ the characters are each on screen for only a brief time before we are on to the next character. Not enough time to get to know them, let alone like them or care about them or hope they resolve whatever problems we really don't have enough time to learn about.
Nutshell: In the USA segment, an American CIA agent (John Forsythe) wants to bribe the secretary (Donald Randolph) to Castro's right hand man (John Vernon) to steal his papers.... but doesn't want it traced back to the USA, so he goes to his pal in the French espionage pal (Frederick Stafford) who is having problems with his wife (Dany Robin) to get his son-in-law (Claude Jade) to provide a sketch of the secretary so that his agent (the late great Roscoe Lee Brown) whose cover is a florist, can pretend to be a reporter for Ebony Magazine in order to get past security and bribe the secretary so that he can photograph the papers. Oh, and Castro's right hand man has a head of security and the florist has an assistant and the son-in-law is obviously married to the French espionage pal's daughter and... well, there are no shortage of characters in this one segment alone! And the character who does the actual spying stuff is Roscoe Lee Brown - a peripheral character who we will never see again.
That's the big problem with the story - in the Cuba section it's not any of our main characters who sneak onto the military base to photograph the missiles, it's some characters we've never seen before who are only in this once sequence... so when they are in trouble, we don't care. They are disposable characters... and *all* of the characters in this film are disposable - they do their little bit of the story and then we never see them again.
It's like a movie about the extras instead of stars.... and there are no movie stars in the film. Zilch. Hitchcock had paid *half* the budget of his previous film TORN CURTAIN on Newman and Julie Andrews' salaries and that film bombed... so he ditched stars completely for this film, and it suffers because of it. The closest we have to a lead character is the French espionage guy - but he never goes on any dangerous missions himself - he hires someone else. Which means he ends up with soap opera plots - his marriage is in trouble, he's having an affair with an agent, his wife is having an affair with a guy who ends up being a Russian spy, his daughter and son in law have issues... All kinds of silly things that make for a great beach read, but don't work very well on the big screen.
Hitch Appearance: A nurse pushes him through the airport in a wheelchair... then he stands up and walks away.
Great Scenes: Here's where the film really dies - even the worst Hitchcock film usually has a couple of great sequences... but here we get nada. Because the tone is realistic and documentary, there are no real suspense scenes. Let's look at each of the four stories individually...
Denmark: What’s interesting to me about this segment is that it seems to be written for paranoia - but just falls flat. Only a few years later we would get some of the greatest paranoid thrillers of all time - THE PARALLAX VIEW and THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR and MARATHON MAN - but here the paranoia just never takes hold. Would it be the shift in society after Watergate that sparked the paranoid thrillers that followed? Was this movie just made too soon?
At the Russian Consulate a Guard looks out a peephole, into a mirror - all we see is his face in the mirror... watching. Boris Kusinov, his wife and daughter leave the Consulate... the man in the mirror watching. A moment after they leave, a KGB man exits the Consulate and follows. The Kusinov family walks down the streets of Copenhagen... followed by the KGB man. When the KGB man passes a parked car, the man and woman inside get out and join him - 3 KGB Agents following the Kusinovs.
Because this is shot realistic instead of evocative and emotional, the bit where Kusinov realizes they are being followed and walk between a row of buses *just* as another bus comes to block the KGB Agents falls flat. It seems kind of clever, but there is no suspense at all. The Kusinovs think they have lost the KGB Agents and join a tour group for a china figurine factory. Then the daughter spots one of the KGB Agents... except it’s boring. The daughter splits away from her father and mother, drops a figurine so that she will be taken to the office... and uses a phone to call...
CIA Agent Mike Nordstrom (John Forsythe) - the puppet master of this story. He tells the daughter to be at a department store just before closing and they will help them get rid of the KGB followers. Forsythe is ultra-low key, completely unemotional.
When the department store closes, the Kusinov family leaves and a group of CIA Agents block the KGB Agents. Kusinov and his wife and daughter run to where Mike waits on the street with a car... but the daughter is hit by a bicycle as she is running to the car... goes down screaming in agony and *not moving* while the KGB Agents get past the CIA Agents. Is she an idiot? Probably - but this piece of manufactured suspense doesn’t work at all because Mike just grabs her and helps her to the car. It’s but it's no big deal. A little suspense generated, but it’s over in a blink.
After that they go to the airport, put the Kusinovs on a plane, fly to Washington, DC and take them to a safe house where they are debriefed. Boring on purpose - so that it seems realistic. Kusinov is a KGB Agent himself, and he’s seen many top secret US papers. The CIA boss asks Kusinov if he’s ever heard the word “topaz” used - and Kusinov says it’s a gem stone. Hey, it’s also the title of the movie, so maybe it’s important?
Just then Mike gets a call... from French spy Devereaux (Frederick Stafford - also bland) who asks him to come to dinner. Why would he ask him to dinner? Why is that an important question? But in this movie, an offer of dinner is *exciting*.
Mike and Devereaux have dinner, along with Mrs. Devereaux (Dany Robin). After she excuses herself, Devereaux says that Paris *knows* they have Kusinov - but how did they get the information? You might think this question would drive the rest of the film - but it’s basically forgotten for the middle two stories. So for *half* of this LONG 143 minute film, the whole “topaz” thing (mole in the French Intelligence Bureau) doesn’t even come up. Until the last segment, it’s just this single line - how did Paris find out about Kusinov defecting?
Now, here is the problem with this segment: not exciting, and no real story. Unlike any of the three stories in PULP FICTION, we just have stuff happening. Compare it to THE GOLD WATCH or the last story where they blow the kid’s brains all over the inside of the car and have to call Mr. Wolf for help. Those stories were *stories* and had beginnings and middles and ends. Here we just have this fragment... It was all about the Kusinovs - but we will never see them again!
New York: Devereaux and his wife go to New York on holiday because his daughter and son in law will be in town - son in law is a journalist who is covering the Cuban delegation addressing the United Nations. When they check into their hotel they find Mike waiting for them... Kusinov said that the Cubans have some top secret papers with them about some top secret thing those danged Cubans are doing... could Devereaux find out what those papers say? The son in law has sketches of everyone from the Cuban delegation and they find the sketch of the #1 Cuban Guy’s assistant Uribe - who has been known to take a bribe now and then.
This segment is all about what the Cuban Guy’s secret papers say. Oh, #1 Cuban Guy is played by a bearded John Vernon from POINT BLANK and ANIMAL HOUSE.
Now we have Mike as puppet master pulling Devereaux’s strings... and Devereaux as puppet master pulling the strings of his informant Dubois (Roscoe Lee Brown) who pretends to be a reporter from Ebony Magazine to bribe Uribe to steal the #1 Cuban Guy’s briefcase with the secret papers so that Dubois can photograph them. There’s a suspense scene that doesn’t work at all where Dubois photographs #1 Cuban Guy while Uribe steals the briefcase a few feet away, and then some suspense that doesn’t work where #1 Cuban Guy is looking for a document that may be in the briefcase... while Uribe and Dubois are in a bathroom down the hall taking pictures of the documents. The problem with both of these scenes is that they are shot blandly (to keep the film real looking) and, well, what the hell do we care about Dubois? He’s a puppet of a puppet!
#1 Cuban Guy finally notices his briefcase full of top secret papers missing and grabs #2 Cuban Guy (red beard) and they kick down the bathroom door and see Uribe and Dubois taking pictures of the documents. Dubois jumps out the window, and there is a chase... but it's not very exciting. It’s emotionless action, and part of that might be that we don’t really think of Dubois as anything more than a pawn in the story... that story experiment biting the film in the butt big time. Well, Dubois gets the camera to Devereaux during the chase - and then the rest of the chase doesn’t matter because if they catch Dubois - what does it matter? He’s a pawn, so we don’t care about him... and he doesn’t have anything important on him.
Off screen - Devereaux develops the film, meets with Mike, discovers the Russians are shipping something into Cuba that may be nuclear missiles, and Mike pulls the puppet strings again so that Devereaux will go to Cuba to investigate...
Which brings us to On Screen after all of this happens and Devereaux is having a big soap opera argument with his wife because she thinks he has a mistress in Cuba and wants him to quit his job and pay more attention to her and... well, soap opera stuff. It’s as if someone notice how completely unemotional this film has been and decided to throw in some fake emotions half way through. But who cares?
Cuba: This segment is all about photographing what is on the ship that just arrived from Russia - are they nuclear missiles?
So Mike’s puppet Devereaux goes to Cuba where he *does* have a mistress - Juanita (played by Karin Dor from the James Bond movie YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE). Juanita is *also* the mistress of #1 Cuban Guy! She gets around. She is also the head of the Cuban underground. So Mike has Devereaux have Juanita have her agents the Mendozas (middle aged husband and wife) go to take pictures of the ship. Okay - how much do we care about the Mendozas? They are only in a few minutes of this film, we have no idea who they are other than Juanita’s agents... and we kind of have no idea who Juanita is other than Devereaux’s mistress. We are so far removed from any characters we *might* care about that what happens to the Mendozas doesn’t matter.
Well, due to a bird taking their picnic sandwich (I’m not making that us) the Cuban Army spots the Mendozas and gives chase. A really short chase... and they are captured because the woman is bleeding. Not a big scene. Hitchcock talked about using blood as a trail of “bread crumbs” for bad guys in an interview about another film, but here it’s not really used here. Still a great idea, and I’ve used it (complete with a fake out trail to throw the pursuers off the trail) in a film. Here it seems like more of an excuse for capture - the agents notice the bleeding and slap the cuffs on her.
But the camera and the pictures get back to Devereaux, who leaves Cuba just as #1 Cuban Guy figures out what is going on (thanks to #2 Cuban Guy recognizing Devereaux from New York) and the Mendozas are killed, Juanita is killed, but Devereaux gets away.
The film shows nuclear missiles being unloaded from a ship... and Devereaux’s wife leaves him... and Mike tells him that there is a mole in French Intelligence named Topaz, and would Devereaux go back to Paris to flush him out?
Paris: The last segment is unmasking Topaz. From this description is may seem like these pieces all fit together - but for that whole center section of the film we have completely forgotten about Topaz, and once Topaz is unmasked... there will still be nukes in Cuba. This doesn’t resolve the problem at all.
Devereaux has lunch with French espionage agents (including an impossibly young Philippe Noiret) and when one of the French guys leaves he goes home to... Devereaux’s wife who he is having an affair with! Dunt-dunt-daaaa! And when she leaves she sees Noiret arriving (or maybe it was the other way around) and Devereaux gets his son in law to go to all of the French Intelligence guys as a journalist and say “TOPAZ!” to see if they react... and gets a reaction from Noiret... and the son in law gets captured off screen and escapes off screen and maybe even goes to Disneyland off screen, but shows up after Noiret has been murdered by Topaz and Devereaux’s cheating wife sees the sketch of Noiret and realizes she saw him at her lover’s house and that means the lover is Topaz and that means we can grab our coats and leave the cinema.
There was originally a different ending - a scene where Devereaux and Topaz (who is his wife’s lover) have a duel to the death in a sports arena... but audiences laughed at test screenings and Hitchcock had to change it to an off camera suicide. Actually, there were a couple more ending tries that failed before Hitch was forced to find cutting room floor footage and create the suicide.
Music: Maurice Jarre does an okay score that sounds a lot like his JUDGE ROY BEAN score - so maybe he recycled it.
The best thing in TOPAZ is probably the *seamless* integration of actors into a real Castro speech. It shows the power of editing to make you believe things that never happened. But this sort of trick may make the film seem “real” but doesn’t make it engaging and interesting and involving. We are not pulled into the story.
The whole film is kind of ho-hum and shows the problem with doing experiments in a script and film - most experiments fail. That’s why we call them experiments. Even though some of the experiments in Hitchcock’s films don’t entirely succeed, they usually have a handful of great scenes, or the experiment itself is interesting to watch (like in ROPE). Here we discover the importance of having a protagonist who is involved in the entire story - *the* pivotal character in each segment. He learn this because this experiment fails - four stories with four different protagonists squeezed into a 143 minute film doesn’t give us much time to care about any of these people or get to know them... so they remain chess pieces moved around the board to tell the story. The more you split the focus among different protagonists, the more you split our emotions so that we don’t have time to care.
- Bill
The other Fridays With Hitchcock.
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