Random Hitchcock: Topaz (1968)

Since our Hitch grab bag is pretty finite, why not just continue it?  After all, it's Mother's Day weekend and this mom is a huge fan of the master of suspense!!

OK, I have to admit that Topaz is one of least favorite Hitchcock movies.  I find, frankly, boring; and my parents lived through the Cuban missile long before I was born in Florida and the rest of my relatives in southern Georgia...but that didn't stop me from hearing about it long after it happened and I was born.  I don't know...maybe that why I find this movie tedious.  The thing that always gets to me is that the film in 143 minutes long....but then, so are a lot of other films that never feel that long.  Although I know that this is based on a novel (which I have never read), there is just something in me that thinks that Hitchcock didn't do the cold war so well, and it wasn't because he didn't have the espionage thriller down cold.  His film career cataloged so well the run up to World War II was chilling in it's accuracy; despite that the people running the show (the politicians) had their heads in the sand in Europe; but the Cold War, he didn't do so well.  Granted, he was getting up in age and decades of morbid obesity was taking it's toll on his health at the time of Topaz's filming.  I don't think it helped that he was relying, more and more, on storyboarding new projects earlier and earlier in the process of a current project (the effects of not accepting age slow down??).  He was also shooting the film just hours after script changes were made, because he didn't like the screenplay that the novel writer Leon Uris produced.  To Hitchcock's credit in this regard, he was unhappy with the one-dimensional portrayal of the villains, though it's seriously up to debate as to whether this was "fixed" in the final product.  The reason for for the last minute changes were that, apparently, Hitchcock himself didn't read the screenplay until the last minute.   Another factor that makes the film problematic is that Hitchcock himself reportedly claimed that this was an experimental film that didn't work out. And, FINALLY, (I'll shut up soon!), the last vestiges of the studio system managed to rear it's dying head one last time in Hitchcock's life and roar out a mandate that he make the film--it was forced on him and is documented to be one of the worst directing experiences of his long career and it was his worst box office flop.  My opinions and musings aside, the film is set at the absolute height of the cold war and involves French intelligence agents doing some really bad stuff in regards to passing information they should be protecting.