Iron Curtain 1966

      Professor Michael Armstrong is heading to Copenhagen Denmark to attend a physics conference accompanied by his assistant and fiancée Sarah Sherman.  Once they arrive, Michael informs Sarah that he may be staying for awhile and she should return home alone?  She follows him and realizes he's actually heading to East Germany and behind the Iron Curtain.  She is shocked when he announces that he's defecting to the East because the US government cancelled his research project!!  Michael is actually there to obtain information from a renowned East German scientist.  Once he has the information he needs they will make their way back to the West.

     In the book “It’s Only a Movie” Sir Alfred Hitchcock said, "There was an ending written which wasn't used but I rather liked it.  No one agreed with me except my colleague at home (his wife Alma).  Everyone told me that you couldn't have a letdown ending after all that went on previously?  Paul Newman would have thrown the formula away!!  After what he has gone through, after everything we have endured with him and he just tosses it?  It speaks to the futility of it all and it's in keeping with the kind of naiveté of the character.  He is in no way a professional spy who will certainly retire from this type of nefarious business!!

     Looking at these films today, they present a compelling case that Sir Alfred Hitchcock was aware that world cinema had galloped into the future without him.  Luis Buñuel, Ken Russell, Lindsay Anderson, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Bob Rafelson, Agnes Varda, John Frankenheimer, Mich Nichols and many more directors  were smashing barriers every week.  Hitchcock's tried and true methods of tension building and explosive release had lost a bit of their charm because cinema could show audiences anything it pleased.  Was there still a place for his slightly old fashioned experimentation?  He gave it the old college try with "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz," but mainly his audience was unmoved.  And yet, there's absolutely something to these beguiling late-career works.  They lack the immediacy of Frenzy and the jagged humor of  Family Plot but they show a director who had created thousands of people's ideal cinema and unafraid of looking ahead into an uncertain future.  2 1/2* (This movie is so-so)

128 min, Drama directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by Brian Moore with Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, Lila Kedrova, Hansjorg Felmy, Tamara Tourmanova, Ludwig Donath, Wolfgang Kieling, Gunter Strack, David Opatoshu, Gisela Fischer, Mort Mills, Carolyn Conwell, Arthur Gould-Porter, Gloria Govrin.

Note:  Imdb 6.7* out of 10* with 24,958 reviews, Rotten Tomatoes 67% with 30 reviews 53% with 5009+ ratings, Letterboxd 3.1* out of 5*, Amazon 4.4* out of 5* with 544 ratings, Metacritic 55 out of 100 with 8 critic reviews, 7.3 out of 10 with 8 user scores, Roger Ebert, Amazon 4.4* out of 5* with 544 reviews.  

Special Note:  In a conversation with Francois Truffaut, Sir Alfred Hitchcock said that he included the fight scene deliberately.  He want to show the audience how difficult it can be to kill a man!!  This is because several spy thrillers at this time made killing look effortless??  Sir Alfred Hitchcock was so unhappy with this movie that he decided not to make a trailer with his appearance in it!!  One of the reasons Sir Alfred Hitchcock did not want to use Paul Newman and Dame Julie Andrews because of their high fees!!  For the rest of his career, Hitchcock would never hire performers with the same level of fee or more.