Sunday, April 5, 2020

Torn Curtain (1966)

  I thought I had seen all of Hitchcock's movies but I had missed at least one, because I never knew Paul Newman and Julie Andrews made a movie together.  It's not my favorite Hitchcock but it is very suspenseful.

Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) is an American physicist on a European convention tour with his girlfriend/assistant Sarah (Julie Andrews), a doctor in her own fucking right and a peer in the field but whatever, the 60s, when he starts behaving oddly.  Sarah becomes increasingly suspicious of his attempts to ditch her and get her to go home so she follows him on an impromptu flight behind the Iron Curtain into East Berlin where she is horrified to know that Michael plans to defect because the American government won't fund his anti-nuclear weapons defense.  Of course he's not really a traitor, he's a spy sent behind enemy lines to get the missing piece of information from a Russian scientist (Ludwig Donath) so the Americans can scoop the Communists.  He was supposed to go alone but Stand-By-Your-Man Sarah wouldn't abandon him so now he has to figure out how to get both of them back to safety before the East German Secret Police catch them.

This is kind of like if True Lies wasn't a comedy.  It's pretty predictable in that I didn't believe for a second that Paul Newman was going to defect to East Germany but it really maintains tension throughout and works very well as an escape film.  It was on Amazon Prime but I think it was scheduled to come off at the end of March so I might have caught it on the last day.

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