Paul Newman and Hitchcock

SPOILERS

By reading various pieces over the years, it is interesting to see how the relationship of star Paul Newman and director Alfred Hitchcock may have developed with regard to their collaboration on "Torn Curtain."

It begins with the fact that "Torn Curtain" is not seen as one of the best Hitchcocks. It is not "Rear Window" or "Vertigo" or "North by Northwest" or "Psycho."

Some years after the film's release and failure, Paul Newman said about the movie "we all knew we were working on a dog while we were making it," -- which may have been in response to Hitchcock's own public grousing about Newman and especially Julie Andrews being "miscast" in "Torn Curtain" as a rocket scientist and his science-minded fiancee.

But other comments have arisen over the years that put things in a slightly different perspective:

First, that Paul Newman and Julie Andrews were cast "over Hitchcock's wishes" confirmed that Hitchcock had lost personal power at the time. Universal Studios Chief Lew Wasserman, Hitchcock's former agent and a personal friend, put pressure on Hitch to cast the "hot" Newman and Andrews because Hitchcock's last two films -- "The Birds" and "Marnie," had underperformed with not terribly big stars in them (Tippi Hedren was a near-unknown, Sean Connery wasn't really big yet, Rod Taylor was second-tier.)

Still, though Hitchcock felt Andrews didn't fit her role, he was actually interested in working with Paul Newman. Hitchcock was seeking a male star to replace the aging Cary Grant (his first choice for "Torn Curtain," who said no) and James Stewart. Hitch had studied Newman's films like "Hud" and the Hitchcockian "The Prize" and saw potential.

For his part, Newman took an active interest in "Torn Curtain" once he agreed to it. The 1999 Los Angeles Hitchcock Cenntennial displayed a single-spaced, multi-page memorandum from Newman to Hitchcock with Newman's comments on every scene in the movie script, in order.

The memo opens warmly, with Newman relating about his 40th birthday party flipping off a diving board in his backyard pool with his kids all around. I'm writing a book, Newman jokingly tells Hitch: "I Flipped at Forty." Newman then moves on to "Torn Curtain," offering, first up, his disappointment in the title: "It just doesn't have the power of 'Notorious' or 'Vertigo' to me."

(Note: I think "Torn Curtain" is a fine Hitchcock title, playing off the phrase "Iron Curtain" nicely. Also: imagine, Paul Newman wrote that memo at 40 and he's still with us, another 40 years later.)

Hitchcock disregarded Newman's memo; Hitch's scripts were usually "locked in" except for some line changes and improvisation.

Newman came to a dinner at Hitchcock's home and bugged the formal director by taking his suit-jacket off and putting it over his dinner chair, and eschewing Hitch's hand-picked wine in favor of going into Hitchcock's kitchen and pulling a beer out of the refrigerator.

Exactly what happened between Hitch and Newman on "Torn Curtain" isn't clear. Hitch complained to Truffaut in their interview that Newman's Method-actor mannerisms and demands hurt the movie -- but Hitchcock had already worked with he difficult Method Man Montgomery Clift, and lesser Method actors Eva Marie Saint, Martin Landau, and Martin Balsam without incident. Maybe the aged Hitchcock was just too tired to put up with such demands anymore.

For his part, Newman was chagrined: "Hitchcock told me the story, and it sounded very suspenseful and exciting. I don't know what went wrong." The story of "Torn Curtain" IS suspenseful -- its the old "undercover agent gambit" as Newman acts like he's joining the bad guys, but isn't really. But scene by scene, the story goes flat, with Newman and Andrews slowly moved away from the center of the movie to favor a parade of other characters and set-pieces.

Despite having once called it a "dog," Newman gave a later interview in which he said he saw "Torn Curtain" and didn't think it was that bad. In the same interview, Newman (rightfully) noted that Hitchcock should not have bad mouthed Newman and Andrews as miscast after hiring them. "If he didn't want us, he shouldn't have hired us," Newman said, noting with some pride, "we were stars and people did come to the movie because we were in the film. We gave up other projects to work with Hitchcock." In Newman's case, he gave up something very special: the solid lead in "The Sand Pebbles," which Steve McQueen took instead, leading to an Oscar nomination.

Maybe because he lost "The Sand Pebbles" to do it, Paul Newman doesn't look too happy in "Torn Curtain." When he's in a bad scene, he pretty much refuses to act well in it (example: exposition with the fake farmer on the trailer.) HOWEVER, in the film's several fine scenes, Hitchcock does well by Newman and Newman rises to the challenge.

In the famous scene where Newman must kill his East German bodyguard when the latter follows him to a farmhouse meeting with a counteragent, Newman is wonderfully tense as the agent corners him and exposes him as a fake traitor. Newman looks for all the world like a little boy having to confess to his father that he took cookies from the cookie jar. As it becomes apparent that Newman must kill this other, older man or be imprisoned (with the woman spy he is with being executed), the amateur spy engages in a brutal, grubby fight scene which Hitchcock intended to (1) debunk James Bond karate fights and (2) show how long, hard and difficult it is to kill a man. Newman has to get down and dirty and dragged across the floor in this fight to the death, and plays deep shock very well after he finally kills his opponent and must wash the blood off his hands.
One doubts Cary Grant would have submitted to such degradation.

Newman's other great scene is a "chalkboard duel" in which his scientist must trick an arrogant old East German scientist out of a secret formula by writing wrong formulas on the board and goading the old man into giving his secret up in response. Newman's wise-guy charm and intelligence surfaces here in a way he rarely gets to use in Hitchcock's movie, in other scenes.

Irony: right before making "Torn Curtain," Newman made a better movie called "Harper," with Janet Leigh, who was famously killed in the shower in Hitchcock's classic "Psycho" (1960.) Newman told Leigh how excited he was to be working with Hitchcock as she once did.

Right after making "Torn Curtain," Hitchcock made a better movie called "Hombre" with Martin Balsam, who was ALSO famously killed in "Psycho" (on the stairs.) I can only imagine Newman looking at Balsam and saying "So how come when you worked with Hitchcock, you were in a great classic, and when I worked with him, I was in a dog?"

As the years went on, Newman spoke better of Hitchcock, and actually attended the director's 75th birthday party in Los Angeles (Newman was in town filming "The Towering Inferno" at the time.) Newman eventually said that he and Hitchcock got along well, and should have been good friends, "but that script got in the way."

Alfred Hitchcock paid for bad-mouthing Paul Newman and Julie Andrews to the press. They would be the last two major stars to agree to work with Hitchcock. Sean Connery turned down "Topaz," Michael Caine turned down "Frenzy," and a host of stars (Burt Reynolds, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Roy Scheider, Faye Dunaway) turned down "Family Plot."

To the extent that "Torn Curtain" has positive attributes (and it does) one of them is simply watching Paul Newman, fortyish and in his most handsome years, doing what he can when he can to project a very virile and movie-starrish leading man presence in Hitchcock's brutal but old-fashioned film. And during that famous murder scene, Hitchcock and Newman served each other mutually well with an unforgettable dramatic sequence that brought out the best in both men.