Ecarle---go right on feeling expansive . . .
---
Thank you!
---
If only Connery had played the role of Andre---he might've added the needed lift to this work . . .
---
As I've noted, I personally viewed -- at a Hitchcock display in 1999 in Los Angeles ---
1968 storyboards for "Topaz" in which Sean Connery was clearly drawn as Andre. Its as if Hitchcock felt if he DREW Sean Connery as the lead, he could land him. I expect Connery felt trying to play a Frenchman was too much of a stretch with his voice. (Interestingly, the man who did play Andre, Frederick Stafford, was Austrian.)
Hitchcock had casting problems on his later pictures. These were ensemble stories and sometimes with distasteful roles(the rapist and rape-murder victim in Frenzy, for instance.)
With Topaz, Connery was probably the most "starry" choice available, but the roel of Andre would have been a perfect fit for another marquee star, a real Frenchman:
Yves Montand.
Well, imdb confirms that Montand was offered Andre(and his real-life wife Simone Signoret was offered Nicole) and both turned the roles down.
With Montand and Connery out, Hitchcock had to go with an unknown -- Stafford.
Jon Finch as Richard Blaney in Frenzy is too young for his part -- a forty-something vet in the book. Richard Burton was the perfect casting. Well...we have learned in recent years(a book on the making of Frenzy) that Hitchcock offered Blaney to Burton FIRST, and was turned down. And then turned down by Richard Harris. And Michael Caine turned down the rapist-killer Bob Rusk.
Blaney and Rusk are unsympathetic roles, perhaps(a born loser, a sex killer) -- but Hitchcock maybe started paying the price for saying "actors are cattle" too much.
--
(I always liked it) . . .
---
Me, too. We are in agreement that Hitchcock's final years at Universal were problematic..a lot of it was Universal's cheapjack production qualities and micromanagement, but some of it was Hitchcock's age and health.
And yet, he did something interesting with each of those final films, his intelligence and artistry informs all of them.
Topaz benefits from the fact that Universal boss Lew Wasserman granted Hitchcock's wish to film the Copenhagen and Paris scenes on location(Torn Curtain had been fakery and second unit process shots), along with some good footage of New York and DC. It LOOKS like "a major motion picture." And the story jumps all over the world.
The weaknesses are in some bad scenes, some overlength, and a maddening unwillingness to really become a thriller. I've always found it shocking that what could have been an exciting scene -- Jarre is murdered and Andre's son in law escapes from the killers before he they can kill HIM -- is simply TOLD to us by the son in law! Was Hitchcock too tired to film action?
But the entire Hotel Theresa in Harlem sequence is great(with Roscoe Lee Browne as an anchor); the Paris scenes are good; the structure of the film works.
Oh, it has no ending. Well actually three alternatives, none of them work.
---
---
Yes, I recalled that line from Nicole . . . what is a secret? What isn't? With all these affairs information can flow around and around . . .
---
I think Topaz is rather delightfully...and ruefully...about this very fact: secrets are life-and-death, classified information that can affect many lives BUT...people are sharing them all the time. When they aren't trying to steal them.
I do like how the plot of Topaz boils down to: "We've got a Communist traitor in our NATO meetings and we can't let him hear what we know about the Cuban Missile Crisis." Tattle-tale! Tattle-tale!
---
An interesting point on Parra & Juanita . . . in the novel both Parra and Juanita are arrested and both are tortured . . . Hitchcock handled all this differently--and for the better . . .
---
Ah, yes. I vaguely remember that about the novel. Just goes to show you, as a storyteller Hitchcock knew how to tell a story BETTER than his source. Often.
---
Ecarle---have you ever read the novel Topaz by Uris? If not, give it a read . . . you'll notice immediately it's two very different stories being rendered!
---
Well, its like this. I read Topaz...in 1969, shortly before the movie came out at Xmas. And I can't remember a thing save a brief sex scene between Rico and Juanita(one of those "he forces himself on her but she gives in" things.) Because that's a naughty memory that a young mind keeps in middle age.
I do recall that the movie and the book didn't match up hardly at all. I think the opening defection in Copenhagen was a match, that's about it.
Its probably a good time for me to seek out the novel of Topaz and give it another read!
My "Hitchcock fandom" came into age around 1967/1968 -- I was very young, but I knew good thrillers when I saw them. Consequently, I ended up getting to read three books before Hitchcock made his final three films from them:
Topaz
Goodbye Picadilly, Farewell Leiceister Square(became Frenzy)
The Rainbird Pattern(became Family Plot)
...as I recall, the movie Frenzy matched up pretty well to the book(the potato truck scene was pretty much a replica from the book)...but Topaz and The Rainbird Pattern did NOT match their movies.
Indeed, The Rainbird Pattern ended with the heroes and villains all dead(or, in Bruce Dern's case, marked for death.)
reply
share