Pacionsbo
Absolutely Fantastic
Fairaher
The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
Aubrey Hackett
While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.
Hitchcoc
I like Julie Andrews. I don't like her character in this film. She is portrayed as the stereotypical female of the fifties and sixties who can't keep her nose out of things. She is asked to do some things on faith, and off she goes to defy a simple request. She is constantly in the way in tense situations. But the plot is pretty good and while not a work of art, there is good tension and suspense. Of course, the East Germans are about as helpless as they can be, missing opportunities to put an end to Newman's activities. It is hard to tell who the good guys are sometimes. I have to say that the scene at the farmhouse is classic and shows how hard it is to kill someone without the aid of a gun. It seems endless as Newman and the woman do everything they can and are barely able to escape. By the way, do we ever get to know what happens to her or where she went. I'm hoping this fictional character was able to take off after burying the evidence. The final scenes are somewhat stock (the theatre thing was done already). Anyway, it's a really fun romp with signature actors.
Grumpy
Let us face the facts, no matter how uncomfortable they may be. Julie Andrews is just dreadful in this film. Furthermore, her dreadfulness drags down everything around her. I find this fact difficult to face. Julie Andrews was the symbol of everything good and right with the world, when I was a child. Now I have to face up to the fact that she was not what I thought she was. Her ability to maintain the same frozen expression of suffering would have made her a wonderful Joan of Arc. It's the only role in creation where her "my feet hurt" demeanor would really pay off. I once imagined that Dame Julie was the most poorly cast actor in Hollywood. I imagined that while she was absurd in every movie she starred in, this perception was merely the result of the unfortunate truth that most people could not, and did not, see her on stage on Broadway--in her element--as Liza Doolittle or Guinevere. But in the information age I've learned that she was just as much a plaster bust as Doolittle or Queen Gwen as she was in Torn Curtain. It's all out now. The horrible truth. It's not Hitchcock or Newman who drags this film into East Germany and leaves it there, it's Dame Julie.
SnoopyStyle
Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) is a physicist and Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews) is his assistant/fiancée. The government had rejected his work on an anti-missile defense. They're in Norway for a conference. He tells her that he's going to Stockholm but she finds out that he's actually going to East Berlin. She follows him there. To her shock, he declares that he is defecting to the east once they arrived.Alfred Hitchcock had already achieved greatness when this movie opened. The problem with this movie is that it fails to reach the same heights. This is a rather bland unoriginal espionage movie. It feels like a script from the maybe pile. The dialogue has no sting. There is no shock value. I never bought Armstrong's defection. The long kill of the East German Stasi agent is pretty good but it still lacks realism. It's a run-of-the-mill thriller from somebody who should have done better.
merrywater
Did Hitchcock choose to name the bad guy 'Hermann' as a pun towards Bernard Hermann whom he sacked during the shooting? Hermann Gromek is one of the most memorable Hitchcock crooks that I spontaneously can think of, a sleazy, shrewd and intimidating type of a guy.Otherwise the movie is some kind of a travel brochure with all its locations and swift changes of means of transport.Newman's acting wasn't bad but I find it hard to accept that he didn't bother to learn German before 'defecting', being an academic and so on. Being an academic myself, I expect - out of experience - other academics to know at least three languages with reasonable command.Andrews. Terrible woman. I have true difficulties in watching anything where she's cast as she is completely in lack of sex appeal and annoying British accent. (I find Grace Kelly's accent annoying too, but that girl had IT, so to speak.) I don't believe that Hermann's score would have done anything to improve this! The sequences where Newman and the East German scholar doodle formulas on a blackboard, are those formulas authentic or random inventions?Besides Gromek, the ballerina was great.
