The story is loosely based on the 1962 Sapphire Affair,[3] which involved the head of France's SDECE in the United States, the spy Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, a friend of Uris,[3] who played an important role in "helping the U.S. discover the presence of Russian offensive missiles in Cuba."[3]
Plot
In Copenhagen in 1962, a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer, Boris Kusenov, defects to the West. During debriefing, CIA agent Mike Nordstrom learns that Soviet missiles with nuclear warheads will be placed in Cuba.
Needing physical evidence, Nordstrom discloses Kusenov's name to French agent André Devereaux and asks him to bribe Luis Uribe, a member of Cuba's UN delegation, to provide photographs of documents that confirm the missile bases in Cuba. Devereaux decides to accompany his daughter, Michèle, on her honeymoon to New York City with his son-in-law, François Picard. André's wife Nicole is worried that André is using the family trip to work for Nordstrom in New York.
In New York City, French agent Philippe Dubois is to contact Uribe, who is the secretary to Cuban official Rico Parra, who is staying at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem to show solidarity with the black community.
Dubois sneaks into the hotel and bribes Uribe to take the documents from Parra's office to photograph. Parra catches Dubois photographing the documents. Chased and shot at by Cuban revolutionaries, Dubois purposefully knocks into Devereaux, who is watching events from the other side of the street, and slips him the camera. A red-headed Cuban guard helps Devereaux to get up but lets him go. Dubois escapes into the crowd around the hotel.
Dubois's photos confirm that the Soviets are placing missiles in Cuba. Devereaux, despite accusations of infidelity by his wife Nicole, flies to Cuba. His mistress, Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor), was the widow of a "hero of the Revolution," which enables her to work undercover in the resistance. Upon his arrival, Devereaux finds Parra, another of her lovers, leaving Juanita's mansion. Devereaux asks Juanita to take photographs of the missiles. Juanita's loyal domestic staff, Carlotta and Pablo Mendoza, pose as picnickers and photograph the missiles. Pursued, the two hide the incriminating film before they are captured.
During a mass rally and a lengthy speech by the líder máximo, the red-headed Cuban guard recognises Devereaux's face from the New York City incident.
Parra has heard from the tortured Carlotta Mendoza that Juanita is their leader. He embraces her and shoots her dead to save her from extreme torture.
At the Havana airport, the Cuban authorities fail to find the microfilms that Deveraux has. He returns to find that Nicole has left him. Devereaux is recalled to Paris. Before he leaves, Kusenov tells him about the existence of a Soviet spy organisation, "Topaz," within the French intelligence service. He is given the name of NATO official Henri Jarré, who leaked documents to the KGB.
In Paris, André is picked up at the airport by Michèle and François. He accompanies Michèle to a cocktail party at his friend Jacques Granville's house. Michèle wants to reconcile her parents, as Nicole has found out about André's affair with Juanita. When Michèle asks her mother to help her father, she refuses. At the party, Jacques confesses to a friend that he once liked Nicole, but that she married André. André invites some of his old friends and colleagues, including Granville and Jarré, to a lunch at a fine Paris restaurant under the pretext of helping Devereaux prepare for his inquiry. Devereaux tells the others about Topaz to provoke some reaction. Jarré claims that it is misinformation and that Kusenov died a year ago.
Jarré panics and visits the leader of the spy ring, Jacques Granville. Devereaux, Nicole, and Granville were close friends from their days together during the French Resistance. Granville tells Jarré that it was a mistake to say Kusenov was dead since the Americans will easily discover that Jarré lied. As Jarré leaves Granville's house, Nicole arrives to meet Granville, who is her lover. She glimpses Jarré departing.
Devereaux sends his son-in-law, François, to interview Jarré and coax him into admitting something. Before François can succeed, two mysterious men show up. Devereaux and Michèle rush to Jarré's flat and find Jarré dead, a staged suicide, and François missing. François returns to Michèle's apartment and says he was clubbed and kidnapped, but managed to escape from his captors' car, after overhearing the phone number of their boss, known as Columbine, the head of Topaz.
Nicole recognizes François's sketch of Jarré as the man she saw leaving Granville's house, and recognizes the phone number as Granville's. She tearfully tells her family that Granville he must be the leader of Topaz. Granville, exposed, commits suicide (in the American and the French versions) or flees to the Soviet Union (in the British version).
Shel Talmy and William Piggott Brown first tried to option the film rights to Leon Uris's novel for $500,000 in 1967, but the deal was halted by the Bank of England because of the 1967 devaluation of the pound sterling. Alfred Hitchcock first hired Uris to adapt his own novel for the screen five months later. Afterwards Philippe de Vosjoli filed a lawsuit against Uris, Universal Pictures, and MCA Inc claiming that they had stolen the plot for the novel and film from his unpublished manuscript Le reseau Topaz. De Vosjoli and Uris settled out of court with a deal that would give Uris full rights to the profits from the film but gave de Vosjoli half of the profits from the novel.[4]
Reportedly, Hitchcock and Uris differed on aspects of character development, with Hitchcock claiming that Uris had not humanised the villains of the story. Uris also did not appreciate Hitchcock's insistence on adding black humour. After a portion of the draft had been written, Uris left the film. Hitchcock attempted to hire Arthur Laurents to complete the work on the screenplay, but he refused, leaving an unfinished draft while the shooting schedule was rapidly approaching. Ultimately, Samuel A. Taylor, cowriter of Vertigo, was hired, but the film began without a completed screenplay. Some scenes were written only hours before they were filmed.[5]
Hitchcock changed the script shortly before the beginning of filming, and the distributor, Universal, forced an ending that was different from the one that was preferred by Hitchcock.[6] For Topaz, Hitchcock engaged the 19-year-old French actress Claude Jade from Truffaut's Stolen Kisses. She and Dany Robin, who was cast as her mother, would provide the glamour in the story. "Jade is a rather quiet young lady," Hitchcock later said, "but I wouldn't guarantee [that] about her behaviour in a taxi."
Production
Like his previous films Rope and The Trouble with Harry, Hitchcock intended the film to be an experiment for whether colours, predominantly red, yellow and white, could be used to reveal and to influence the plot. He later admitted that it did not work out.[5]
Hitchcock's signature cameo appearance occurs around 28 minutes into the film. At the airport, he is seated in a wheelchair as he is being pushed by a nurse. She stops, and he nonchalantly stands and greets a man and proceeds to walk off screen with him.
Alternative versions and endings
Hitchcock's first cut of the film ended with a duel between Devereaux and Granville in a French football stadium. It was shot by associate producer Herbert Coleman when Hitchcock had to return to the United States for a family emergency. Audiences panned the ending during test screenings. They also said the film was far too long.
Under pressure from the studio, Hitchcock shot a second ending that he actually liked better, with Granville escaping on an Aeroflot flight to the Soviet Union as Devereaux and Nicole board their adjacent Pan Am flight back to the United States. However, the ending apparently confused audiences. Also, screenwriter Samuel Taylor objected to the villain escaping unpunished, and there were fears that the ending would offend the French government.[9]
As a compromise, Hitchcock used existing footage to create a third ending in which Granville is exposed and expelled from a NATO meeting. Over a shot of the exterior of his apartment, the sound of a gunshot tells that Granville commits suicide behind his drawn curtains, since no footage of his suicide existed.[10]
The film was released theatrically with this third ending and was also edited down by nearly 20 minutes to a final length of 127 minutes. The "airport ending" briefly appeared on British prints of the film by mistake, but those prints were soon altered to match the version that was released elsewhere.[11]
The 1987 laserdisc contained the 127-minute theatrical cut, along with the first release of the two alternate endings, as bonus features. The 1999 US DVD contained the first release of the extended 143-minute cut of the film, using Hitchcock's preferred second ending, in which Granville escapes. All three endings appear as extras on the US DVD, together with an "Appreciation" by Leonard Maltin in which Maltin discusses the deleted scenes and the alternate endings.
The extended cut adds a sequence after Devereaux returns to Paris, in which he is picked up at the airport by his daughter Michèle and his son-in-law François. Michèle brings Devereaux to a cocktail party held by Granville, which Nicole is also attending. Michèle hopes her parents will get along, but Nicole cannot forgive Devereaux's affair with Juanita. Devereaux and Michèle stay alone, and Granville complains to the agent Martin that he regrets that Nicole married Devereaux.
The longer 143-minute version of the film has since been released numerous times on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Blu-Ray in the US and the UK. Most other countries worldwide have the shorter theatrical cut on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray.[12]
Topaz earned $3.8 million in box office rentals from the United States and Canada in 1970.[13]
Critical reaction
Vincent Canby of The New York Times placed the film on his year-end list of the ten best films of 1969 and declared it a "huge success, a quirky, episodic espionage tale made rich and suspenseful, not through conventional Hitchcockian narrative drive, but through odd, perverse Hitchcockian detail, economy of cinematic gesture, and an over-all point of view that can never for a moment be mistaken as belonging to anyone but Hitchcock."[14]Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times also liked the film and wrote that although there was a "loss of momentum" at the climax because of the time taken to resolve the complex plot, the first three quarters of the film were "bravura displays of the fabled Hitchcock technique, replete with dazzling camera movements and acute imagery." Thomas singled out the Harlem sequence as among "the best that Hitchcock has ever done."[15]
Variety wrote that it "tends to move more solidly and less infectiously than many of the maestro of menace's best remembered pix. Yet Hitchcock has brought in a full quota of twists and tingling moments. It is just that the picture seems to move predictably and lacks the fun and surprise blood curdling moments that can lift his thrillers with breathtaking excitement."[16]The Monthly Film Bulletin in Britain wrote that the film had "intermittent pleasures (the silent conversation behind hotel doors seen from across the street, the long pull back across the conference room and the reverse track forward ending with a zoom on to Piccoli's face), yet we are constantly deprived of the action set pieces which would have given the narrative its much needed boost. It is known that Hitchcock had trouble with the climax (and juggled three different endings); but the one finally chosen for the commercial print here looks as if it could have been devised by anyone."[17] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "The film as a whole dies from a lack of humor and animation.... The awful truth is that Hitchcock would probably be better off if he retired. The most one can say for his direction of 'Topaz' is that it's polished: The compositions are symmetrical and the photography is glossy. But if this is all it is, the film might as well be the work of a disinterested computer."[18]Pauline Kael of The New Yorker called it "the same damned spy picture he's been making since the thirties, and it's getting longer, slower, and duller."[19]John Simon described Topaz as both wretched and senile.[20]
Some American critics complained that there was no Hollywood star in the movie such as Ingrid Bergman or Cary Grant although the cast included the renowned international film stars Claude Jade, Michel Piccoli, and Philippe Noiret, the last of whom had previous successes that had been primarily in France. Some attribute Hitchcock's casting choices to his negative experience of working with Paul Newman on Torn Curtain, but Hitchcock is said to have approached Sean Connery, who had worked with him in Marnie, for André and Catherine Deneuve for his wife. Some critics[who?] have inferred that Hitchcock was hoping to groom the relatively unknown Frederick Stafford as a star of his own making, like Tippi Hedren; however, Stafford remained unknown in Hollywood though he had a lengthy career in European films.
Topaz had its American network television premiere on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies on January 29, 1972. Topaz currently holds a 69% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 32 reviews, with an average rating of 6.2/10.[21]
Claude Henri Jean Chabrol was a French film director and a member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s. Like his colleagues and contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, Chabrol was a critic for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma before beginning his career as a film maker.
Les Diaboliques is a 1955 French psychological horror thriller film co-written and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse and Charles Vanel. It is based on the 1952 novel She Who Was No More by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
Claude Marcelle Jorré, better known as Claude Jade, was a French actress. She starred as Christine in François Truffaut's three films Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979). Jade acted in theatre, film and television. Her film work outside France included the Soviet Union, the United States, Italy, Belgium, Germany and Japan. She was most famous on television as the heroine of the mysterious adventure series The Island of Thirty Coffins.
Maurice-Alexis Jarre was a French composer and conductor. Jarre is best known for his film scores, particularly for his collaborations with film director David Lean composing all of his films from 1962 to 1984. Jarre received numerous accolades including three Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globes, and a Grammy Award.
Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli was a French actor, producer and film director with a career spanning 70 years. He was lauded as one of the greatest French character actors of his generation who played a wide variety of roles and worked with many acclaimed directors, being awarded with a Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival and a Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin Film Festival.
Karin Dor was a German actress. She was famous to international audiences for her role as Bond girl Helga Brandt in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967) and her appearance in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Topaz (1969).
Philippe Noiret was a French film actor.
Shoot the Piano Player is a 1960 French New Wave crime drama film directed by François Truffaut that stars Charles Aznavour as the titular pianist with Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, and Michèle Mercier as the three women in his life. It is based on the novel Down There by David Goodis.
Jean Bruce, born Jean Brochet, was a prolific French popular writer. He also wrote under the pseudonyms of Jean Alexandre, Jean Alexandre Brochet, Jean-Martin Rouan, and Joyce Lindsay. He died in a car accident in 1963 at the age of 42.
Dany Robin was a French actress of the 1950s and the 1960s.
Michel Subor was a French actor who gained initial fame with the starring role in Jean-Luc Godard's second feature, Le petit soldat (1960), but the French government banned it until 1963 because of its political content, touching on terrorism during the undeclared Algerian War. He acted in a couple of American films in the late 1960s including the role of Claude Jade's husband in Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz. In 1999, he once again played Forestier in Beau Travail, a highly praised variation of Billy Budd, directed by Claire Denis. He continued to work with her.
Frederick Stafford was a Czechoslovak-born actor. Born Friedrich Strobel von Stein, he spoke fluent Czech, German, English, French and Italian, and was a leading man in European spy-movies and in Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz.
Topaz is a Cold War suspense novel by Leon Uris, published in 1967 by McGraw-Hill. The novel spent one week atop The New York Times Best Seller List, and was Uris's first New York Times number-one bestseller since Exodus in 1959. During its 52-week run on the list, Topaz set two records in two weeks; those for largest positional jump to number-one (9–1) and largest positional fall from number-one (1–5).
Life and Nothing But is a 1989 French film directed by Bertrand Tavernier. It was inspired by the novel by Albanian writer Ismail Kadare titled The General of the Dead Army.
Que la fête commence... is a 1975 French film directed by Bertrand Tavernier and starring Philippe Noiret. It is a historical drama set during the 18th century French Régence centring on the Breton Pontcallec Conspiracy.
European Parliament elections were held in France on 12 June 1994. Six lists were able to win seats: an alliance of the centre-right Union for French Democracy and the Gaullist Rally for the Republic, the Socialist Party, the Left Radical Party, the French Communist Party, the National Front and Philippe de Villiers' eurosceptic right-wing dissident UDF list, which formed the Majorité pour l'autre Europe. 53.5% of the French population turned out on election day, actually an improvement on the last election in 1989. The Greens, who were weakened by an Ecology Generation list led by Brice Lalonde and also suffering from internal divisions between the party's left and the right, lost all 9 seats won in 1989. Arlette Laguiller's Trotskyst Workers' Struggle (2.27%), Jean-Pierre Chevènement's left-wing eurosceptic Citizens' Movement (2.54%), the L'Europe commence à Sarajevo List (1.57%) and the agrarian populist Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Traditions (3.96%) were among the notable lists which did not pass the 5% threshold.
Étienne Périer was a Belgian film director.
The Guv'nor is a 1935 British comedy film starring George Arliss, Gene Gerrard and Viola Keats, and directed by Milton Rosmer. Arliss in the title role is a tramp who rides a series of misunderstandings and becomes the president of a bank. It was a remake of the 1934 French film Rothchild. The film was re-released in England in 1944 and 1949. It was released in the US as Mr. Hobo.
Mauregard is a French miniseries by Claude de Givray (1970) with Richard Leduc, Claude Jade, Henri Guisol, Brigitte Auber and Michel Subor.
The Martel affair, sometimes known as the Sapphire affair, was a spy scandal that took place in France in early 1962. It involved information provided by former high-ranking member of the KGB, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected to the United States in December 1961. Golitsyn stated that the Soviets had agents placed throughout French military intelligence and even within French President Charles de Gaulle's cabinet. He claimed that these agents had access to any NATO document on demand.
References
↑ Smith, Cecil (February 27, 1972). "Alfred Hitchcock: Thirty-seven Years after '39 Steps'". Los Angeles Times.
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