Alfred Hitchcock (132 page)

But Hitchcock’s biggest defeat was Dor’s big love scene with Stafford, which all along Hitchcock had eagerly planned (“unknown to actors and [the] entire company,” according to Borsten) as his first opportunity to thumb his nose at the fading Production Code; he’d show his lead actress and actor naked from the waist up. A wardrobe woman rushed up to him before the filming, wringing her hands. “Oh, Mr. Hitchcock, Mr. Hitchcock, Miss Dor can’t do it. …” Dor’s body was marked with scars from surgery. Then, almost laughably, Stafford followed a moment later to explain that he too had gone through lung surgery and now bore a livid scar from one side of his chest to the other. Hitchcock merely gulped, and said with a deep sigh, “Very well, we shall film the scene from the shoulders up.”

From script to postproduction,
Topaz
was nothing but “a dreadful experience,” in Taylor’s words. Hitchcock rushed through all the planning. He shot backgrounds that weren’t used, and scenes that were later dropped. At the same time he indulged in foolish extravagances over minute details: on the verge of shooting a French dinner scene, he held up filming until he could make contact with a Parisian restaurateur to confirm the precise amount in a single serving of pâté de foie gras.

He wasn’t the same Hitchcock who could patch the flaws of
To Catch a Thief
into a sparkling film, regardless of trouble along the way. Ralph Tandowsky’s longtime partner, Dr. Walter Flieg, had inherited the job of Hitchcock’s physician, and for the first time a doctor attended the director on-set throughout the making of a film, hovering discreetly nearby even in Copenhagen and Paris. The obvious burden Hitchcock was under alarmed friends and associates. “He was no longer the great brain that sat in the chair watching ‘round him,” recalled John Forsythe, who had acted in
The Trouble with Harry
and on television for Hitchcock. “He would go away
for fifteen or twenty minutes and lie down if he could, and it was sad to see.”

After finishing principal photography in March, the director took a short break, then returned to Paris in mid-April to shoot the grand climax of the film. This was to be the greatest of the film’s choreographed crescendos—a scene not in the book, but in Hitchcock’s mind from the beginning. It was an old-fashioned pistol duel between Devereaux (Stafford) and Granville (Piccoli), the “Topaz” mole and lover of Madame Devereaux, set at dawn in a deserted soccer stadium. During the duel, Topaz is shot in the back by a Russian sniper.

Hitchcock got only halfway through the weeklong shoot before he was forced to leave the set prematurely for entirely unexpected reasons. Whereas Forsythe and others had been holding their breath over the director’s health, word came from America that Alma—invincible Alma—had been hospitalized. Distraught, Hitchcock told Herbert Coleman that he was unable to continue filming.
Topaz
didn’t matter to him at all, he said, if Alma was in danger. He gave precise instructions to Coleman, who—just as he had done for Hitchcock on
To Catch a Thief
—finished the location work. The director left for Hollywood, where news of Alma’s brief illness—vague and undiagnosable—was kept from the papers.

The film was jinxed to the end—and the editing of the duel sequence became a particular sore point.

The French government had objected to
Topaz
, with its portrait of Soviet sympathizers infiltrating their highest ranks. Permission to film in Paris was suspended until the U.S. ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver, arranged a meeting and reassured authorities of Hitchcock’s honorable intentions. Although Hitchcock was perfectly capable of double-crossing the French, as he had fooled censors and studio officials throughout his career, the duel sequence was there partly to assuage them by exterminating the Soviet mole—punishing the villain, as in Production Code days of old.

But when the Hitchcock film was test-screened in San Francisco, the audience reaction was divided dramatically between people who thought
Topaz
was the best movie they had seen in years, and others who felt it ruined a great book. “Because the audience had been recruited from fans of the Leon Uris novel on which the film was based,” wrote Bill Krohn, “outrage was in the majority.” And the worst derisive laughter greeted the visually spectacular duel scene, which nonetheless struck many Americans as a ludicrous anachronism.

Although Hitchcock had always pooh-poohed previews, this time he
had to answer to Universal—and to his own nagging doubts about
Topaz.
Although he had always toyed with alternative endings, now, for the first time since
Suspicion
, he changed an ending purely to answer the preview cards. He hastily agreed to ditch the duel, and returned to France to film an alternative ending at Orly Airport, with Devereaux and the French traitor boarding plans for Washington and Moscow, respectively, and waving to each other cynically.

While it eliminated the old-fashioned duel, the trouble with this ending was that it revived the possibility of the French condemning the film. And Sam Taylor especially hated the idea that the traitor might be allowed to abscond, telling Hitchcock that the revised ending was too cynical—“a betrayal of the very story you have told. … Your point, that you have made so effectively, is that the Cold War, and spying, and power politics, destroys lives.”

Taylor convinced Hitchcock to work from available footage to devise yet a third alternative, to be used only in case of “emergency,” and even then solely in France: the audience hears the noise of a gunshot, followed by a freeze-frame of the front door of Topaz’s house. This would hint at the traitor’s suicide, along with “flashback shots of characters destroyed to achieve American goals superimposed over that image and one of a man reading a newspaper about the Cuban missile crisis,” in Bill Krohn’s words.

Over the summer, Hitchcock stubbornly maneuvered to keep one of his two replacement endings. He thought the Orly Airport one was the toughest, the most realistic, but Universal preferred the freeze-frame, which wouldn’t offend anyone. Vacationing at the Villa d’Este in August, Hitchcock phoned editor William Ziegler to make a final decision. Orly Airport “is really the correct ending,” he insisted. “In every case, whether it be Philby, Burgess [or] Maclean, they’ve all gotten away with it and they’ve all gone back to Russia.”

There was internal debate right up to release, and then a compromise: different versions would be made available for different markets. It wasn’t the first time the director had been obliged to offer different versions of Hitchcock films to different markets; it had been going on since Islington days. But it hadn’t happened to him in a long time, and it was all the harder to swallow now, at the twilight of his career.

Topaz
varied wherever it was shown. The Rank Organisation in England insisted on cutting at least twenty minutes out of the film, for example; in London, Universal showed the freeze-frame ending to critics at the premiere, and the Orly Airport version to the general public. American and French audiences got the freeze-frame. It was, Truffaut wrote later, “a solution of despair.”

And what of the spectacular duel, doomed by preview audiences?
Hitchcock told film critic Penelope Houston, ruefully, “I’ll probably let Langlois have it”—meaning Henri Langlois, the director of the renowned Paris Cinémathèque archive. After all the trouble with France, he probably meant it ironically. But after his death the duel sequence—which Hitchcock “smuggled out of Universal and kept in his garage,” according to Krohn—was indeed donated to the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Today it can be viewed, along with other cut scenes and ending variations, on the DVD edition of
Topaz.

When
Topaz
was released at Christmas, 1969, the other films stirring excitement in theaters—
Easy Rider, Alice’s Restaurant, Putney Swope, Midnight Cowboy, Take the Money and Run, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
—seemed to augur an American Nouvelle Vague. In contrast, Hitchcock’s latest looked all the more creaky and lackluster.

Following so closely on the heels of the Truffaut book,
Topaz
should have offered a magnificent capstone to Hitchcock’s career. But the film disappointed—and in some quarters even the book backfired. Truffaut was attacked in the influential
Film Quarterly
for his preoccupation with technique and form as opposed to substance, and the extravagant artistic claims he made for Hitchcock were unfavorably compared, by Gavin Millar in
Sight and Sound
, to the director’s own relentless anecdote-telling and persistent self-deprecation. Truffaut’s “twin assertions in the introduction that Hitchcock is a major influence on world cinema and that he is grossly underrated,” asserted Millar, “seem to demand a level of response from Hitchcock himself beyond anything which the book gives us.”

Although many young critics idolized Hitchcock, it was just as true—as it had been true even in the days of his earliest silent-film triumphs—that others were offended by the attention and adulation he received. The young detractors included such prominent critics as Pauline Kael of the
New Yorker
and Stanley Kauffmann of the
New Republic
, and they could be as extreme as the worshipers. (As far back as
Vertigo
Kauffmann had declared Hitchcock’s career dead, and called the James Stewart—Kim Novak film “an asinine, unredeemed bore.”) Richard Corliss in
Film Quarterly
now wrote that Hitchcock “is neither the Shakespeare of film, as Sarris and Robin Wood state, nor its Shadwell, as Pauline Kael might want us to believe.” Corliss argued that
Topaz
was really two films: “inept and effable, poorly acted and well acted, shoddily shot and exquisitely shot, mediocre and transcendent.”

Better on balance than
Torn Curtain
, with some genuinely worthwhile elements,
Topaz
has grown in critical estimation, just as the Truffaut interview book has come to be accepted as a model of its type. Bill Krohn,
for one, regards
Topaz
as “a chilling panorama of the human toll taken by Cold War politics.” That’s certainly what Hitchcock had hoped for—but he wouldn’t have agreed with Krohn’s verdict. He himself regarded
Topaz
as “a complete disaster,” according to John Russell Taylor, “whatever some of his wilder admirers may say in its favor.”

Nineteen seventy went by in a blur of celluloid. Hitchcock continued his diet of French and Italian films, but also screened youth-exploitation movies about drugs and campus revolution (
Getting Straight
, Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point
, even
Woodstock
), and a surprising number of “blax-ploitation” pictures (as if trying to puzzle out an audience he had virtually ignored in his own films). He kept up with the James Bonds, with the Academy Award contenders, with films made by old friends as well as autumnal works by colleagues like William Wyler and Billy Wilder. He re-watched
Citizen Kane
and
The Big Sleep.
He seemed never to miss a Walt Disney picture, and tried dutifully to sit through everything produced by Universal.

Old friends stopped by the office or came to dinner at Bellagio Road. Hugh Gray, Victor Saville, Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison, Whitfield Cook, Herbert Coleman, and Norman Lloyd stayed in touch. Once or twice a week Hitchcock had lunch with Lew Wasserman, usually joined by MCA agents Herman Citron or Edd Henry. Mrs. Hitchcock sometimes came to the office for lunch, though often Hitchcock ate alone—or, if he was in the mood to talk, with Peggy Robertson.

He still attended all the important stage shows at the downtown theaters.
He still enjoyed horse racing, and several times accepted invitations to share a racetrack box with former MGM director Mervyn LeRoy, for whom he had a soft spot;
^*
he and Alma were also hosted several times for dinner by onetime MGM executive Benny Thau.

Hitchcock was now without a new film, or even his television series, before him; his schedule was never more open-ended than at the dawn of the new decade. Some days he simply stayed home, “reading properties,” according to the steady notation in his logbook. Getting in to see the legendary Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t hard: writers from small film journals, college students running film societies, a collector of rare recordings by Eric Coates (often hailed as the British king of light music), all got appointments.

A lesser man, after the triple whammy of
Marnie, Torn Curtain
, and
Topaz
, might have elected to retire and rest on his laurels. But Hitchcock gave no hint of quitting. If anything, failure had made it all the more important for him to try again, and he spent most of 1970 resting, coaxing his body back into shape. The time off seemed to work, and when Hitchcock had a thorough physical on April 6, 1970, the results were positive.

It was a cautious year, spent close to home, Universal, and Dr. Walter Flieg. The director took a week in Hawaii, and a few days in Canada, but there were no quick hops to New York, no long trips abroad; even weekends in Santa Cruz were down to a handful.