Torn Curtain

A few snippets of dialogue in the scenes in the East German university clearly show that the extras are Americans.

Reflected in the window of the farmhouse as Armstrong enters.

Or their shadow, anyway.

On the road-level shot of Armstrong's taxi leaving the farm (Gromek's motorbike is visible on the left of the screen), just at the very bottom of the image can be seen the shadow of the camera (4:3 television version only).

In the farmhouse scene when Professor Armstrong is fighting with Gromek, Gromek is choking Professor Armstrong but Armstrong shows no signs of it, i.

bruising, in later scenes.

When Professor Armstrong is on the boat, the heater aboard ship is broken, and the close-up of the thermometer shows it is freezing - yet it spite of the fact that he and all the extras are wearing heavy coats, their breath yields no steam, which would have been profuse at that temperature.

The handwriting Professor Armstrong gives to the radio operator aboard ship and the note that he later writes to his fiancée is not the same - both handwriting samples clearly do not match.

When Professor Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) is writing the address on a piece of paper in the beginning of the movie he writesKobenavn.

The actual spelling isKobenhavn.

The message Professor Armstrong writes out in the bathroom stall, "Contact Pi.

" does not match up with the letters underlined on p.

107 of the book, the source of the coded message.

When Professor Lindt is erasing the chalkboard of his calculations, two shots show him erasing only the right side.

But in a subsequent shot, the entire chalkboard is erased.

When Gromek's motorbike is unearthed, the chrome is shiny, without any soil on it.

The cold war ... who doesn't like it?

"Torn Curtain" was one of two films made on an espionage theme by Alfred Hitchcock in the late sixties, the other being "Topaz". Michael Armstrong, an American physicist, apparently defects to East Germany.

Entertaining, but a minor Hitchcock film, despite the big casting. It begins with that great suspense atmosphere we are accostumed to, but then turns itself in a quite conventional cold war film, with many unconvincing situations.

I respect the director Alfred Hitchcock and the two main stars Paul Newman and Julie Andrews. Who wouldn't?

Alfred Hitchcock directed this cold war espionage thriller that stars Paul Newman as Professor Michael Armstrong, who is in Stockholm for a physics conference with his assistant & fiancée Sarah Sherman(played by Julie Andrews). She is shocked when, after refusing to go back home, he announces that he is defecting to the East in protest over a canceled research project.

This is in the same league as Topaz and, as such, is not a great film - nothing close to Notorious. Paul Newman is hugely miscast.

Director Alfred Hitchcock at times falls short of his own high standards and this movie is an obvious example. Coming in the mid-1960s, when the Cold War drew a clear line between NATO the East Bloc countries, a movie about the conflict was a great opportunity for Hitchcock to put his own imprint on the era.

Torn Curtain, in spite of what some may believe, was not a flop. Critically mauled, it did however not fail at the box office.

Hitchcock was a little late to the party when it came to the mid 60s vogue for making Cold War thrillers, but I still think that this is an underrated and unfairly maligned film. It's a little long and could have happily edited out some unnecessary scenes (those jarring back-projection shots again!