Topaz

I knew going in that Topaz was a movie made during a creative low period for Alfred Hitchcock, but I always hope that I'll find something in these movies with poor reputations that others missed, or at least appreciate them from a different angle. Nope. The legends are true. Topaz sucks. It is a deflating, lackluster, forgettable movie that feels like Hitchcock was a gun for hire instead of an unparalleled icon. Topaz sucks in so, so many ways, it is almost hard to catalog them. As a matter of fact, that's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to list all the faults, bullet-point style. That's what Topaz deserves. - Coming off of the awkward Torn Curtain, Topaz feels like a retread, but told inside out. Same Cold War politics, same travel to remote locations to get secret information, same distrust between a husband and a wife, only none of Torn Curtain's shortcomings were fixed. - Instead of getting A-list actors, Topaz is stuck with dollar store nobodies, and the quality of acting suffers for it. Some are wooden, some are hammy, all of them are mediocre. - The cast is too damned big, with many characters coming and going in a single scene. Not a single character is given any depth greater than "he's a spy" or "she's a wife" or "she's a counter-revolutionary". Hopes, thoughts, fears, ambitions, that's all out the window here. Only the barest of essentials are necessary so the plot can be moved forward. - The plot is less a linear narrative and more like a series of lily pads in a pond. They form a straight line, sure, and a frog could hop over them, but they lack connective tissue. Their only connection is that they are sequential. Consequences from one scene to the next are limited to what is necessary for the plot and nothing else. - The lack of character depth and lack of narrative cohesion result in the stakes of this movie being non-existent. It is impossible to care about what's happening, which is the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the POV keeps shifting, the goal keeps changing, and the movie drags on at the speed of an arthritic turtle. - The "protagonist" (because he comes and goes, but he's the protag by virtue of percentage) is a cad and a jerk, so, good luck cheering for him, which again undercuts the severity of the situation, which I remind you was potential global nuclear warfare. - You don't even find out what Topaz is until about 70% of the way through the movie, and by then, you're so exhausted, it doesn't matter. And it is only tangentially associated to the CMC. - The score never fits. Not once. Not even on accident. I don't know what movie the composer was scoring, but it wasn't Topaz. I think you get the point by now that this is a low point for Hitchcock. His post-Psycho career was very hit or miss, and Topaz sits squarely in the realm of the latter. It is an insufferable bore, an incomprehensible mess, and a movie so bored with itself, it becomes self-aware in the last moments, when the protag says the movie's last line: "Anyway, that's the end of Topaz". Not soon enough.