COLD WAR ESPIONAGE SEEMED A NATURAL SUBJECT FOR ALFRED Hitchcock, who in the 1930s, enriched the genre with such classics as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. These films were apolitical espionage—or rather, espionage with politics so carefully muted that viewers were free to make their own associations. Hitchcock “cared not a whit for politics,” in that he did not identify with any party or fit into any political category, right, left, or centrist.
A plot of mounting suspense mattered more than the reasons for a planned assassination (The Man Who Knew Too Much), coveted defense plans (The 39 Steps), or an encoded folk melody (The Lady Vanishes). In The 39 Steps (1935), the spies’ objective, acquiring a blueprint for a fighter plane, is only clarified at the end, when it is obvious that “Hitchcock has even less interest in it than we do.” In The Lady Vanishes (1938), by the time we know why Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), a British spy, has been kidnapped on board a train traveling from the mythical Bandrika (perhaps a stand-in for Austria) to London, the movie is almost over. The hero and heroine, Michael (Michael Redgrave) and Iris (Margaret Lockwood), have gone from repulsion to attraction, becoming allies in their attempt to expose an ingenious plot to kidnap Miss Froy and pass her off as a heavily bandaged patient in need of surgery. With Hitchcock, people are rarely what they seem. A nun is a fraud in high heels. Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas), a seemingly benign neurosurgeon with a German accent, is the mastermind behind the kidnapping. And least important in terms of plot—but not in terms of its resolution—is the heroine’s decision to stay with the hero, with whom she has experienced the adventure of a lifetime, rather than marry her milquetoast fiancé.
Like most intricately plotted spy films, The Lady Vanishes is a tangle of incidents knotted to the point of frustration, but then unlaced, with each strand attesting to the deceptive naturalness of the events as they occurred. That was Hitchcock’s genius: to make the weirdly improbable dramatically possible, so that disbelief is not so much suspended as ignored. Once you are caught up in the narrative undertow, you remain submerged until you’re deposited on shore. It was also part of Hitchcock’s genius to make the MacGuffin, “what . . . the spies are after,” a kind of afterthought—a piece of information that is explained once, and only once, to satisfy those more interested in knowing the reasons for the kidnapping than in stringing along with Michael and Iris in their attempt to save Miss Froy and themselves from Hartz’s machinations.
What exactly is Hartz after in The Lady Vanishes? It is only near the end of the film that Miss Froy explains that she has encoded in a folk tune a vital clause in a secret pact between two European nations. Which two, one might ask? We never know. Hitchcock could not care less. Once the MacGuffin has served its purpose, “[I]t is actually nothing at all.” Suspense is everything; the explanation is a freebie.
When The Lady Vanishes was released in August 1938, Hitler had already taken over Austria. A month later, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference, umbrella in hand and brandishing a piece of paper, to assure Britons that there will be “peace in our time.” Hitler will make no further territorial demands after acquiring the Sudentenland, the German-speaking part of the former Czechoslovakia. But any optimism was short-lived. The annexation was merely the prelude to his absorption of the entire country. A year later, on 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and Britain was again at war.
The Lady Vanishes contains some cryptic fragments of dialogue (“England is on the brink,” “conditions as they are now”), which would have disturbed the politically astute. On another, and perhaps deeper, level, the film reflects an uneasy optimism, “a British mood immediately after Munich.” The villain with a German accent, whose quarry is British to the core, can only mean one thing: Germany has designs on Britain, and it is only a matter of time before they become apparent. Thus far, Hitchcock has left the enemy unnamed, although there could only have been one possibility. Since Germany had not yet become a belligerent, it was never identified as the country plotting assassinations, stealing blueprints for airplanes, or kidnapping British agents.
The situation was different when Hitchcock made his next espionage (and second American) film, Foreign Correspondent (1940). When Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood at the end of March 1939, Europe was five months away from war. Between 18 March and 29 May 1940, when Foreign Correspondent was being filmed, the Nazis had overrun Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands. When the film opened in New York on 27 August, the Battle of Britain was raging; on 7 September, the London Blitz began. There was no way Foreign Correspondent could end on a tentative note.
Foreign Correspondent portrayed the world on the brink of war. On 20 August 1939, reporter Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea) is elevated to foreign correspondent. The date is significant; the world is two weeks away from war, as headlines and calendars keep reminding us. Hitchcock generates the kind of suspense common in movies in which the outcome is known (for example, Titanic; depictions of the crucial 5–7 December 1941 weekend in Pride of the Marines and especially Tora! Tora! Tora!); however, the incidents leading up to it are dramatized so compellingly that the audience forgets about 1 September. Their attention is focused on what is happening between 20 and 31 August, as Jones is thrown into Hitchcock’s unhinged world, where a crypto-fascist poses as the head of a peace foundation; a Dutch diplomat’s lookalike is assassinated on the steps of a conference hall; windmills with reverse-turning vanes function as a primitive version of air traffic control; the wing of a plane that crash lands in the Atlantic acts as a life raft; and the MacGuffin—a treaty between Belgium and the Netherlands—proves a moot point. If it was an alliance against Hitler, it did little good in spring 1940, when both countries fell to the Nazis.
When war finally erupts, it is almost anticlimactic. But Hitchcock makes the declaration of war part of the coda, in which Jones delivers a wake-up call to America at a radio station that has lost electricity. Broadcasting in darkness, he reminds Americans that they have yet to suffer Britain’s fate: “All the noise you hear isn’t static. It’s death coming to London. . . . You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and in the homes.” London has become a city of darkness, but America’s lights have not been extinguished. “Hello, America. Hang onto your lights,” he urges. “They’re the only lights left in the world.” In August 1940, Jones was right. But even America would know its share of air raids and blackouts.
In Hitchcock’s spy world, characters must either fend for themselves, or depend upon the kindness of strangers until they are forced to function on their own. Each scenario has a variety of possibilities. In The 39 Steps, Hannay (Robert Donat) must prove his innocence by exposing a spy ring known as “the thirty-nine steps.” There is no reason why a crofter’s wife should befriend him, much less give him her husband’s jacket; why the heroine (Madeleine Carroll) should change from adversary to ally, particularly after she had been handcuffed to him and forced to accompany him on his quest; why an innkeeper and his wife are hospitable to them, when it is obvious they are on the run. The answer is simple: They wear their innocence on their faces and their hearts on their sleeves. In The Lady Vanishes, Michael and Iris use their wits—he more than she—to solve the mystery of the vanished lady. They receive no help from their fellow passengers, some of whom deny ever having seen her. Once Johnny Jones—with little help from anyone, including the heroine, who is the villain’s daughter—makes the giant leap from innocent abroad to one-man intelligence operation in Foreign Correspondent, he becomes a source of light for a world in shadow. For the rest of his career, Hitchcock used the same plot lines, refining or embellishing them. If it was a “wrong man” movie, he needed an actor with the face of a Candide, like Robert Cummings in Saboteur (1942). Although Hitchcock would have preferred Gary Cooper—whose “aw shucks” image would have resulted in a different rite of passage (hayseed to spy catcher)—Cummings underwent a similar transition without the burden of a persona, creating a more believable character in an unbelievable but engrossing movie.
Saboteur opens with an explosion in a California defense plant. The explosion results from a fire that burned out of control after Barry Kane (Cummings) handed a fire extinguisher to his friend, who immediately went up in flames because the extinguisher had been filled with gasoline. This act of sabotage was in keeping with Hollywood’s vision of a post-Pearl Harbor America overrun with spies and saboteurs, who will stop at nothing to disrupt the war effort. Like Hannay in The 39 Steps, Kane becomes a fugitive, but he is so guileless that even the victim’s mother does not report him to the authorities. A garrulous truck driver gives him a lift and later misdirects the police so Kane can escape. A blind composer welcomes him into his cottage; the composer’s niece, Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane), is ready to turn him in until they meet up with a circus caravan, whose performers sense his innocence—all, that is, except the midget with the Hitler-like moustache whom the others denounce as a fascist. But once the couple reaches New York on their cross-country odyssey, they are on their own. Los Angeles may be the city of angels, but angels fear to tread in New York. Kane must find a way of escaping from his basement prison to prevent a battleship from being blown up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Pat must risk her life to trap Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd), the saboteur, at the Statue of Liberty, where Kane confronts him on Lady Liberty’s torch, from which one of them will fall—and it will not be Kane.
Hitchcock approached espionage as if it were a branch of affirmative action. The field is open to women, age unspecified and ethnicity subject to popular taste—meaning, for the most part, Caucasian females (Annabella in The 39 Steps, Elsa in Secret Agent, Miss Froy in The Lady Vanishes, Eve Kendall in North by Northwest). But no female agent was ever recruited the way Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) was in Notorious (1946), and by Cary Grant no less. Devlin (Grant), an intelligence agent, starts Alicia on a guilt trip because she has an unrepentant Nazi for a father. Devlin intimates—not very subtly—that if she wanted to atone for her father’s sins, she should accompany him to Rio de Janeiro to expose a colony of ex-Nazis. Since Devlin treats Alicia like a tramp, frequently reminding her of her promiscuous past, he expects her to seduce Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) in order to gain access to his inner circle. When Sebastian proposes marriage, the head of intelligence expects Alicia to accept. How else can she show she is a loyal American, unlike her traitorous father? Rarely has a woman been treated so shabbily by men, who see her only as a channel for information. Devlin taunts Alicia for her willingness to sleep with the enemy, hoping that she will prove herself a virtuous woman by insisting that she loathes her job but places her country before her scruples. Alicia, however, will not degrade herself further by encouraging his inflexible morality.
With Devlin as her contact (but not protector), Alicia can rely on no one. It is she who must put Devlin on the guest list for a party so he can gain access to Sebastian’s mysterious wine cellar, which contains more than wine. When Sebastian discovers Alicia’s identity, his mother decides to slowly poison her to death. At this point, unless Devlin rescues her, Alicia cannot free herself from the bedroom that will soon be her death chamber. But that is his job. She does the hard work, he does the (not especially dangerous) rescuing, and American intelligence (the unnamed CIA) takes the credit.
Hitchcock inverted the male-female dynamic in North by Northwest (1959), with Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, the now familiar wrong man (The 39 Steps, Saboteur), mistaken for the non-existent George Kaplan. CIA double agent Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) is not a penitent like Alicia, even though her duties requires her to continue to be the lover of Philip Vandamm (James Mason of the measured cadences), a spy working for an unnamed, but inferable, country. And if Eve has to spend the night with the fugitive Thornhill in her train compartment, it is all in a night’s work.
“George Kaplan” is a decoy created by the CIA to convince Vandamm that such an agent exists and to deflect attention away from Eve, who Thornhill does not know is Vandamm’s mistress—much less a CIA agent. When the head of intelligence, known only as the professor (Leo G. Carroll), learns that Vandamm believes Thornhill is the mythical Kaplan, he realizes the deception is successful. Let Vandamm go on thinking that Thornhill is Kaplan. If Thornhill should meet a tragic end, c’est la guerre froide. At least he would have died for his country.
Eve must maintain her credibility with Vandamm, even if it means sending Thornhill to a rendezvous with death, which he narrowly escapes. A one-night stand is no guarantee of fidelity, especially if the lady is working both sides of a treacherous street. Since both Thornhill and Eve are playing a dangerous game (although Thornhill doesn’t know the extent of it), they are forced to help each other. To prove she is loyal to Vandamm, Eve shoots Thornhill in public. When Vandamm learns her pistol contained blanks, she is earmarked for disposal “from a great height”—that is, thrown off his private plane.
Although Vandamm seems to be in the employ of the Soviets (who else?) and searching for (what else?) valuable microfilm, North by Northwest is not so much Cold War as romantic melodrama, with a hero and heroine who are the essence of cool and a villain who sounds as if he should be giving elocution lessons to Cockney flower sellers. The film includes some extraordinary set pieces, such as the assassination in the lobby of the United Nations; the crop-duster sequence in which what should have been insecticide turns out to be bullets; and the climactic rescue on Mount Rushmore, when Thornhill saves Eve from falling to her death as he pulls her up the face of the cliff and, in a sensuously smooth dissolve, into the upper berth of a train speeding through a tunnel—Hitchcock’s idea of consummation by rail. For the most part, North by Northwest is a compendium of familiar tropes: wrong man and blonde companion (The 39 Steps, Saboteur); fashionably dressed enemy agents whose appearance belies their agenda (The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur); a MacGuffin (the microfilm); the climax at a familiar landmark (the London Palladium in The 39 Steps, the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur); and the hand-on-hand finale (Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll holding hands in The 39 Steps; Norman Lloyd holding on to Robert Cummings in Saboteur). Hitchcock was a perennial recycler, but the end result is always new.
Hitchcock could have made a Cold War hair-raiser if he had remained faithful to Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds,” the second of eight short stories in the collection Kiss Me Again, Stranger (1952). “The Birds,” set in Cornwall, is told from the point of view of Nat Hocken, a farm worker, who first observes a flock of birds circling restlessly. Assuming the birds are frustrated because the weather has prevented them from migrating, he ignores a portent that the Roman augurs would have considered an ill omen. Even when the birds swoop down without warning and fly through an open window into his children’s room, colliding with each other and bouncing off the walls, he is not alarmed, again attributing their behavior to the weather. The locals feel differently, laying the blame on the Russians: “The Russians have poisoned the birds.” When the birds attack RAF planes, Britain declares a state of emergency. “Won’t America do something?” Nat’s wife asks. “They’ve always been our allies, haven’t they?” Meanwhile, one can only wait and wonder, as Nat does, “how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains . . . giving them the instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.” For a film version, “The Birds” would have to be fleshed out, with characters added. If Hitchcock had retained du Maurier’s plot, the film would have been real Cold War science fiction, a worthy companion to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
For the 1962 film, Hitchcock used only the title and the setting: a coastal community (now California’s Bodega Bay) terrorized by birds. Evan Hunter’s screenplay is really an original, even though the credits read “based on a story by Daphne du Maurier.” Hitchcock was even less interested in the cause of the birds’ behavior than he was in what the spies were after in The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, and North by Northwest. Taken as an allegory of evil, The Birds asks one to imagine that if the main characters—a widow who undermines every relationship her son has with a woman, a son incapable of realizing the hold his mother has on him, and a female intruder who comes between them—were birds, their behavior might be just as irrational. However one interprets The Birds (Camille Paglia has argued convincingly that Hitchcock “has left the ending ambiguous”), one thing is certain: The Birds is not a Cold War parable like du Maurier’s short story.
Oddly, two of Hitchcock’s less acclaimed films are distinctly Cold War in setting: Torn Curtain (1966), set in East Germany, and Topaz (1969), set in Castro’s Cuba. Although fascinated by espionage, Hitchcock only made one spy film in the 1950s, North by Northwest, his last movie of the decade. One would have thought that in the 1950s, when atomic espionage was front-page news, Hitchcock would have considered a film on the order of My Son John or Pickup on South Street. Yet despite their potential as material for compelling drama Hitchcock ignored the Klaus Fuchs, Alger Hiss, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg cases, perhaps feeling that such films could easily become dated. Guy Burgess was another matter. In May 1965, Hitchcock was contemplating a film about Burgess, one of five Cambridge University graduates who became Soviet agents. Perhaps Burgess’s death from alcoholism in 1963 revived Hitchcock’s interest in the Cambridge Five—or at least in Burgess, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1951. Burgess’s sexual orientation was even more challenging. In the 1960s, a director could be less evasive than formerly about a character’s homosexuality, although the love that dares not speak its name was still expressed sotto voce. A gay spy would provide an alternative to the straight James Bond, whose franchise was then in its early stages (Dr. No [1962], To Russia with Love [1964]).
As a rudimentary plot began to take shape, the focus shifted from Burgess—or a Burgess-like spy—to his wife and her reaction to her husband’s treason. Since Burgess was unmarried, the character would have to be a composite, perhaps of Burgess and Donald Maclean, another of the Cambridge Five, who was married with three children and who also fled to the Soviet Union in 1951. This Burgess clone would be neither gay nor bisexual, especially if played by Paul Newman.
It was not surprising that Hitchcock envisioned a film about the effect of one family member’s actions on another, a theme that ran through his three preceding films. In Psycho (1960), the infidelity of Norman Bates’s mother drove Norman to murder her and her lover and, in atonement, to take on her personality. In The Birds (1962), a mother’s unwillingness to sever the silver cord had profound repercussions not only for her grown son and teenage daughter, but also for a woman who has become part of their circle. Marnie (1964) traced the title character’s kleptomania and frigidity to a childhood trauma caused by her murder of one of her mother’s johns. One can only speculate about how Hitchcock might have dealt with a wife’s discovery that her husband is a traitor: a slow death (Notorious), a confrontation at a landmark (Saboteur, North by Northwest), an arranged murder by one party or the other (Dial M for Murder). The wife could also alert Scotland Yard, leading to a romance between herself and the inspector assigned to the case (Stage Fright).
Believing that the Irish novelist Brian Moore would be sympathetic to his ideas—particularly since Moore created such a psychologically complex female protagonist in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne—Hitchcock entrusted him with the screenplay, despite his lack of experience as a screenwriter. But Universal, Hitchcock’s home studio, had already selected the leads: the Hollywood royals Paul Newman and Julie Andrews. Hitchcock was speechless: Hud and Mary Poppins as a communist spy and his unsuspecting wife? Even Moore knew Hitchcock’s premise was unworkable with such casting. What Hitchcock seemed to envision was a film like Suspicion (1941), in which the wife would gradually discover the truth about her husband. But unlike Suspicion, in which the wife’s fears proved groundless, this time they would be confirmed. Such a film would simply be the old Hitchcock, repackaged for the 1960s—but not with Newman and Andrews.
But the two actors could costar in a different type of espionage film, a grand deception in which a distinguished American physicist (Newman) only pretends to be a traitor, so that he can travel behind the Iron Curtain and meet his German counterpart in Leipzig, who, he suspects, knows the part missing from a formula for a defense missile that would make nuclear warfare obsolete. Thus the main character must be a male with a fiancée-lover assistant. All that remained of Hitchcock’s original concept was a woman’s discovery that the man she loves posed as a defector to East Germany, convincing the press that the government’s cancellation of his Gamma Five project, which would banish the threat of a nuclear holocaust, was the reason for his defection.
Torn Curtain represents Hitchcock’s most extensive use of a support group of ordinary citizens and professionals who help Michael (Newman) and Sarah (Andrews) on each leg of their Norway-Denmark-East Berlin-Leipzig-Sweden odyssey, which they could never have managed on their own. In fact, they do nothing on their own, except escape after others have made the preparations.
Brian Moore, who was unhappy with the film (as were the leads), felt that Hitchcock “simply ransacked his bag of tricks.” It would be more accurate to say that Hitchcock repeated familiar motifs, themes, and compositions in a totally new setting. His characters frequently travel long distances (The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, North by Northwest) and in a variety of ways (car, train, boat, plane). But the routes are never the same, and no one’s itinerary resembles Michael and Sarah’s in Torn Curtain, which opens like Psycho with two people in a post-coital state. Unlike Sam (John Gavin) and Marion (Janet Leigh) in Psycho, who are spending a long lunch hour in a ratty hotel room, Michael and Sarah are cuddling under the covers in their cabin on a Norwegian ship, the site of an international physicists’ congress. So we have similar openings, but different couples in different settings.
The mood darkens when Michael receives a radiogram informing him that his book is ready. At first, he refuses the message, but then decides to accept it. In the opening scenes, Michael’s behavior is so enigmatic, and Newman’s face so unreadable, that one might wonder if Torn Curtain is the underside of Suspicion, but with a different disclosure. In the earlier film, a wife’s fears about her husband prove unfounded, even though she had every reason to suspect him of trying to murder her. In Torn Curtain, the crucial book is a mathematics primer, with a marker on the page explaining pi, the Greek letter used to represent the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. Pi is also, as Michael discovers, the code name of an underground organization devoted to transporting Germans from Leipzig to East Berlin, and from there to the West.
Moore knew the kind of screenplay Hitchcock wanted, one in which a bookmarked page sends Michael on a dark odyssey into the anti-communist resistance. Following instructions, Michael manages to elude Gromek, the “personal guide” the communists have assigned to him, and takes a cab to a farm on the outskirts of the city. There he is greeted by a woman who, like the man with the all-American accent driving a tractor, is a member of the underground. Just as the Christians in imperial Rome used their staff to make the sign of the cross in the dirt to identify themselves to co-religionists, Michael traces the Greek letter on the ground. The woman understands the symbol. Her willingness to help Michael is a Hitchcockian article of faith: There will always be people of conviction who take enormous risks to aid the imperiled hero.
When Gromek discovers where Michael has gone, he heads out to the farm. Michael and the woman have no other choice but to resort to violence. But violence in Hitchcock is ritualized. The passengers on the lifeboat in the eponymous 1944 film descend on a Nazi (Walter Sleazak) in a Dionysian frenzy, pummeling him to death before heaving him over the side. The shower murder of Marion Crane in Psycho is stylized slashing. We see Marion step into the shower. Her head turns toward the spray, her mouth open. Then a silhouette appears against the shower curtain, which is violently pulled aside. We next see a slashing knife, a gaping mouth, Marion’s body sliding down the shower wall with her head facing the viewer, her staring eye, and the bloody water gurgling down the drain. The fifty-five or sixty-five cut sequence (“depending on where you start counting”) is a manual for blood sacrifice, with water serving as a purifying agent that cleanses the perpetrator of the deed.
The killing of Gromek in Torn Curtain also occurs in stages. The woman throws soup in his face, and Michael grips him in a stranglehold. She then strikes Gromek with a shovel, but like the undying monster in horror films, he is not felled. She finds a kitchen knife, wielding it at an angle, like Norman Bates in Psycho. Gromek is still breathing. Finally, she turns on the gas jets and opens the oven door, so that she and Michael can stuff him inside. After Gromek has been asphyxiated, she turns off the jets, as the two murderers breathe heavily, like Brandon and Philip in Rope (1948) who, after strangling their victim, savor the moment as if they were experiencing orgasmic release.
Pi reserves seats for Michael and Sarah on a special bus running between Leipzig and East Berlin. The bus sequence recalls the caravan in Saboteur, where the performers in a freak show shelter Barry and Pat, despite the objections of the major, a Hitlerian midget. Similarly, a woman on the bus denounces Michael and Sarah for jeopardizing the enterprise. After some close shaves but no nicks, the bus arrives in East Berlin, where Michael and Sarah encounter a Polish countess (played with seedy bravura by Lila Kedrova), who assists them, hoping that they will sponsor her for a visa to America. But once the police arrive, she is left behind as the couple flees to a travel bureau. There they learn they will be transported in baskets supposedly containing the costumes of a touring ballet troupe. When detected, they swim to a Swedish freighter, where they are taken aboard and given a common blanket. They huddle under it, as the film comes full circle—except that now Michael and Sarah are sitting, rather than reclining.
The extensive network of enablers who leave Michael and Sarah nothing to do but run from one adventure to another reduces them to fairy tale characters guided by clever elves and omniscient birds. The couple also recalls Tamino and Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, who are initiated into rituals for which they have been prepared. All they have to do is sing (Tamino must also play his flute) before they are united in the finale. All Michael does on his own is find the missing part of the formula. By the time he does so, the audience has to be reminded of the reason he played traitor in the first place. What does come through, however, is Michael’s overriding determination to complete the formula, even if doing so means delaying a carefully planned rescue operation—while he and the German professor play the physicists’ equivalent of “Dueling Banjos” at the blackboard. They add and erase, until the professor is so exasperated he provides the crucial piece, which Michael then memorizes. Like Devlin in Notorious, who uses a vulnerable woman to expose an enclave of former Nazis, Michael endangers Sarah’s welfare and pi’s future, until he finds what he is seeking. It is again a case of the end justifying the means. If the end is a good, and the means result in some casualties along the way, c’est la guerre, as the professor in North by Northwest would say. War, hot or cold, is still war.
Hitchcock depicted the dark side of espionage—isolation, loneliness, ambivalence, and remorse—in the critically undervalued Secret Agent (1936) and Topaz (1969). In Secret Agent, a novelist (John Gielgud, theatrically handsome at thirty-one), whom the world believes is dead, is recruited as a spy and given a new name, Ashenden, and a mission: He is to travel to Switzerland and assassinate a German agent en route to the Middle East via what was then Constantinople, now Istanbul. The dateline introducing the film, May 16, 1916, is not accidental. Turkey was neutral when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo. A month later, the Ottoman Empire formed a secret alliance with Germany, signaling its eventual involvement in the conflict. By the end of October, it was official. The Ottoman Empire had joined the Central Powers, throwing its lot in with Germany, which hoped to profit from the alliance by gaining a foothold in the Middle East. Since Turkey was now a belligerent, the agent had to be stopped from reaching Constantinople.
Ashenden has been given a colleague known as the Major (a scene-stealing Peter Lorre, with curly hair and one earring) and a “wife,” Elsa (the glowingly blonde Madeleine Carroll), who, unlike her “husband,” admits she entered the shadow world for thrills. A romantic triangle results when Robert Marvin (the cherubic Robert Young) begins pursuing Elsa. If Marvin comes on as an irresponsible playboy, that was Hitchcock’s intention. First impressions, however, are often misleading. Meanwhile, his only clue a jacket button, Ashenden must find the German agent. Although assassination in the call of duty should depend on more compelling evidence than a button, in wartime any lead is a clue, and any clue can be cause for liquidation. When Ashenden and the Major notice that Caypor’s jacket is missing a button, they assume he is the agent. After the Major pushes Caypor off an alp, they learn they were mistaken. The agent is still at large. Caypor’s murder is atypical of the “wrong man” scenario, in which the accused must prove his innocence. Caypor didn’t have a chance.
The tragic error takes its toll on Elsa, who is shattered by the news, and on Ashenden, who deals with his disgust by getting drunk. The Major, on the other hand, finds the situation hilarious. Secret Agent does not glamorize espionage, despite Madeleine Carroll’s radiant appearance and boutique wardrobe. This is the slimy underbelly of spy world, in which a hiking trip resulting in an innocent man’s murder is intercut with scenes of Elsa and Marvin in the Caypors’ parlor, conversing with the victim’s soon-to-be widow, as the family dog, sensing tragedy, sniffs and whines at the bedroom door. At the moment of the murder, the whine becomes an attenuated cri de coeur. What is extraordinary about the sequence is that the dog’s telepathic sense affects Elsa and Mrs. Caypor, who share the same tragically prescient moment, as if they had just witnessed the murder.
Secret Agent depicts espionage as a profession only for those willing to perform a high-wire act without a net. Ashenden and Elsa have no guardian angels, yet they must play on to the end after learning that Marvin is the agent they have been seeking. Robert Young tries to exude menace in the final scenes, but his moonlike face beams too brightly. Ashenden, Elsa, and the Major must stop Marvin from boarding the Constantinople-bound train. Conveniently—in a rote-like resolution—British planes strafe the train, which crashes, leaving Marvin with just enough life to kill the Major—and Elsa and Ashenden with enough sense to get out of the spy racket. Although the film ends abruptly, with Elsa and Ashenden resigning from the foreign service in favor of marriage, the imposed happy ending does not mitigate the inhumanity of espionage. Secret Agent, along with the much later Topaz, exposes the vulnerability of spies who serve their country. When the chips are down, they’re on their own. There is no shortage of replacements.
Topaz marked the end of Hitchcock’s ventures into espionage. It is also his most unwieldy film, spanning as it does an arc of locations: Copenhagen, Washington, DC, New York, Havana, and Paris. As one might expect from an adaptation of Leon Uris’s 1967 novel of the same name about Soviet spies who have infiltrated NATO, the film suffers from narrative sprawl, running an uncommonly long 127 minutes. Its length places it in the same category as Torn Curtain (126 minutes) and North by Northwest (136 minutes), both of which were more geographically compact. Topaz also suffers from Hitchcock’s now familiar technique of resolving the MacGuffin near the end of the film. This time, the MacGuffin is not what the spies are after, but who the spies are: highly placed French officials in NATO who transmit vital information to the Soviets. The spy ring is code named Topaz, whose head is “Columbine,” and whose second-in-command is a noted economist. One learns about Topaz and the leak in NATO early in the film. The plot keeps branching out like tree roots, and the locales keep changing like a slide show, so that by the time Columbine and his accomplice are unmasked, the film has reached the two-hour mark, making the detection seem more of an appendix.
What is intriguing about Topaz is its unusual protagonist, André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), a French intelligence liaison officer, who works closely with his American counterpart, Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe). Devereaux, then, is a double agent serving two allies. When the CIA needed information about the Soviet missile buildup in Cuba in July 1962, Nordstrom persuaded Devereaux to fly to the island, as he had done in the past. Arm-twisting is unnecessary. Devereaux has a lover there, Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor), the widow of a revolutionary hero. Juanita is now disenchanted with Castro and has become a counter-revolutionary, turning her home into an espionage center with a skilled staff that can hide cameras in poultry and microfilm strips in typewriter ribbons, razor cartridges, and book covers. Hitchcock has come a long way from encoded folk songs and uranium ore in wine bottles.
As the culmination of the director’s espionage cycle, Topaz is also a recapitulation. With a slim frame, a sleekly masculine wardrobe, and a cool demeanor that conjures up crème de menthe over chipped ice, Devereaux is 007 with traces of DNA from Cary Grant, whose crisply pressed suits served as the inspiration for Stafford’s. Despite his jet setting, Devereaux’s pants keep their crease. It is as if a phantom Grant were standing behind Stafford and sometimes emanating from him, imposing his persona on Stafford, who, lacking one of his own, slipped back into Grant’s. And yet Devereaux is unique among Hitchcock spies. Miss Froy (The Lady Vanishes), Ashenden (Secret Agent), and Devlin (Notorious) were never double agents. Hitchcock’s only other double agents are women: Alicia in Notorious and Eve in North by Northwest, who have to toggle between both sides and literally sleep with the enemy. The agents survive; the fortunes of those who serve them vary. The enablers in Torn Curtain go unscathed. Juanita de Cordoba and her staff pay dearly for working against the Castro regime. Two of her servants, Carlos and Rita Mendoza, who had been sent to photograph the missiles during a rally, are apprehended and tortured. In the film’s most potent image, Carlos Mendoza lies unconscious across the lap of his wife, her face battered and her eyes glazed, a gruesome pietà. It is a composition that in some prints appears again at the end of the film. Unable to endure further torture, Rita Mendoza betrays Juanita by whispering her name in a belabored gasp to Rico Parra (John Vernon), one of Castro’s lieutenants. Although Parra is in love with Juanita, the goals of the revolution supersede affairs of the heart. Rather than see Juanita suffer the Mendozas’ fate, he presses her body against his and shoots her. It is stylized death. When Juanita sinks to the floor, her dress fans out like a pool of blood.
In America, civilians involved in intelligence operations fare better. A florist (a brilliant cameo by Roscoe Lee Browne) has a skin-of-his-teeth time microfilming the Cuba-Soviet pact for Devereaux while Castro is holed up at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. But New York is not Cuba, and even if the florist had been caught, Castro and his entourage could never admit that they had been duped into believing that a florist from Martinique was a reporter for Ebony magazine. The defector Boris Kusenov (Per-Axel Arosenius)—a KGB deputy chief who sought asylum in the West in return for information about Topaz—was richly compensated. He and his family were ensconced in a safe house outside Washington, DC, with servants and a housekeeper. His daughter was given a full scholarship to study music at a college of her choice. And Kusenov himself has been promised a job commensurate with his abilities. When Kusenov learns that Devereaux is being recalled after the French discovered he was moonlighting for the Americans, he advises Devereaux to cut as good a deal for himself. Devereaux seems to be doing so at the end of the film, when he and his wife are flying from Paris to Washington, DC. To keep Devereaux’s heroic image intact, Hitchcock does not spell out the reasons for the spy’s departure. It is clear that America rewards informers, although Devereaux would never have considered himself one. And yet, espionage is informing—or rather, informing in a cause sanctioned by the homeland. What do agents do except pass on the information to their superiors? But if the information prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming World War III, and if the leak in NATO was sealed after the exposure of Topaz, it was all worth the effort. Again, the end justified the means, as it always does in spy world.
If, after so many divagations, one can remember that Topaz is supposedly about French spies transmitting NATO secrets to the Soviets, the resolution is an anticlimax. One of the spies, Henri Jarré (Philippe Noiret), makes a major blunder and ends up face down on the hood of a car. “Columbine” is bon vivant Jacques Granville (Michel Piccoli), with whom Devereaux’s wife has been having an affair—an ironic quid pro quo since Devereaux had been having one of his own with Juanita.
Hitchcock experimented with three different endings. The first, which went over poorly with preview audiences, had Granville and Devereaux engaging in an anachronistic duel in a football field. A KGB sniper in the stands shoots Granville, whose usefulness to the Soviets has ended. The second, better ending has Devereaux and his wife departing for Washington, DC, on one plane, and Granville leaving for Moscow on another. Granville waves, shouting “Bon voyage.” Devereaux smiles, knowing a true survivor when he sees one. In the third, originally released ending, Granville goes home and shoots himself. The second is the one television viewers will recognize; it is also the ending of the Topaz DVD in Universal’s Alfred Hitchcock Collection. In this version, a newspaper with the headline “Cuban Missile Crisis Over” is tossed on a park bench. Superimposed over this final shot are the Mendoza pietà, Jarré’s body on the hood of the car, and Juanita’s murder, all grim reminders of the price the world pays for peace, which is just a momentary lull between hostilities.
Although Topaz may feel like an intercontinental travelogue with attractive people, lovely scenery, and an implausible story line, it does have a factual foundation. True-life espionage is often so complex that it can cause the head to shake in doubt or disbelief. French intelligence was dealt a severe blow when the Nazi occupation began in June 1940. In 1944, as the tide of the war was turning in favor of the Allies, the Free French created an agency, Service de documentation extérieure et contra-espionnage (SDECE), whose primary purpose was to hasten the liberation of Europe. Instead, it became another spy organization polarized by tension between non-communist and communist factions, “spying on French colonies and American allies who were doing all the actual work of liberating France.” The communist presence never disappeared. As the Cold War intensified, a Soviet spy ring was formed within SDECE, code name “Sapphire,” whose purpose was to penetrate French intelligence and provide the Soviet Union with information—especially about NATO—that it could not otherwise acquire.
Uris was privy to information obtained from Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, a former member of the Free French, and later head of French intelligence in the United States from 1951 to 1963. De Vosjoli had also set up a spy network in Cuba a year before the Cuban missile crisis, and was aware of the threat posed by Soviet missiles in Cuba. President de Gaulle, irked by the Kennedy administration’s refusal to keep him in the loop, refused to believe that the Soviet Union was establishing a missile base in Cuba. Discredited and ridiculed by de Gaulle, de Vosjoli sought asylum in the United States. The extent of Uris’s indebtedness to de Vosjoli was revealed in a brief Time magazine notice (21 February 1972) stating that after Uris refused to split the Topaz profits with de Vosjoli, the latter went to court and was awarded $352,356, plus interest and half of all future earnings.
De Vosjoli may have been the inspiration for Devereaux, but Uris’s creation was never chief of French intelligence in the United States. On the other hand, Boris Kusenov (“Kuznetov” in the novel) is clearly modeled after Anatoliy Golitsyn, a KGB major who defected in 1961, traveling first to Helsinki and Stockholm, and then to the United States, where he proved an invaluable source of information about Soviet espionage—including the existence of moles in the French government, whom a KBG official termed “sapphires.” In Topaz, Kusenov and his family traverse a similar route, Copenhagen to Washington, DC. There was an economist who was a Soviet mole; he was not French but rather the Canadian Hugh George Hambleton. Unlike the economist in the film, whose murder was disguised as a suicide, Hambleton was arrested and given a ten-year prison sentence. However, Colonel Charles de la Salle, who had been a spy for the Romanians, did commit suicide by jumping out of his kitchen window and landing on a car. Uris used his source material along with his imagination to create his characters, some historically based and others composites or inventions. Unable to use “Sapphire” for the name of the spy ring, Uris chose another gemstone, topaz. It is clear that he never could have written Topaz without the information provided by Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli.
Hitchcock originally wanted Uris to write the screenplay. By 15 June 1968 Uris had prepared an outline, which Hitchcock found unusable. Uris had Devereaux operating an espionage ring in Cuba for France, like de Vosjoli. Juanita also has spies of her own photographing the Soviet ships as they arrive with the missiles. Uris’s Devereaux, realizing the threat posed to the United States, wanted to share his knowledge with American intelligence. But Hitchcock did not want a conflicted protagonist; Devereaux is too cool for pangs of conscience. Hitchcock’s agents follow orders up to a point, but then improvise until circumstances require a different strategy. Devereaux must have enough self-confidence to assist Nordstrom without seeking permission from his government. Since Uris could not provide Hitchcock with the kind of protagonist he envisioned, Samuel Taylor, who coauthored the Vertigo screenplay, inherited the project. Taylor’s was the screenplay that Hitchcock filmed.
Hitchcock showed greater concern for the characters in Topaz than he did for those in Torn Curtain. The Mendozas suffer for a cause, and Juanita dies for a democratic Cuba that has yet to come into being. Devereaux’s job involves frequent separations from his wife, Nicole (Dany Robin), whose icy glamour, alluring but detached, explains his frequent trips to Cuba, where he can check on the missiles and enjoy the company of an affectionate woman. Similarly, Nicole is attracted to the debonair Jacques Granville, whose self-fabricated image complements hers. For both of them, artifice is everything. There is also the irony of Nicole’s liaison with the head of the spy ring that her husband is trying to expose, making for political, rather than tragic irony. Critically and financially a failure, Topaz remains Hitchcock’s most contemporary film, which may explain why those who know or remember the period can be more forgiving of its faults.