Torn Curtain
All actors and roles (10)
All team (19)
Short description
Torn Curtain is a Cold War mystery thriller about Michael Armstrong, an American physicist who travels to Copenhagen for a conference and then appears to defect to East Germany. His fiancée and assistant, Sarah Sherman, follows him behind the Iron Curtain, puzzled by his sudden change of allegiance. In reality, Armstrong is on a covert assignment: he is posing as a defector to get his hands on a formula held by a rival scientist in Leipzig, and his deception puts both of them in danger once the East German authorities begin to suspect his true purpose.
Alfred Hitchcock directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Brian Moore. It was the thirty-ninth of the forty-three features he directed, arriving between Marnie in 1964 and Topaz in 1969. Paul Newman and Julie Andrews play the leading pair, with Lila Kedrova, Hansjörg Felmy, Tamara Toumanova and Ludwig Donath among the supporting cast; forty-two performers are credited in all.
Produced by Universal Pictures and Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, the film had a budget of six million dollars and took thirteen million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.6 from roughly thirty-two thousand votes, and on TMDB it also stands at 6.6, from a much smaller base of about seven hundred votes. A critics' rating of 6.4 from thirty-two reviews places it close to those audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) deliberately included a fight scene in the film to show viewers how difficult it actually is to kill a person, because in the spy thrillers of that time, killings were depicted as a trivial matter.
- One of the reasons Alfred Hitchcock didn't want to cast Paul Newman (1925-2008) and Julie Andrews was that they demanded excessively high fees. He would not cast actors with similar fees for the rest of his career.
- Dissatisfied with the participation of Paul Newman and Julie Andrews in the film, Alfred Hitchcock shifted the focus of the plot from the scientist-defector's wife to an amateur spy and concentrated on the actors and actresses in supporting roles.
- The film features music by P.I. Tchaikovsky (a fragment from the symphonic fantasy "Francesca da Rimini").
- The idea for the screenplay was suggested by an incident in 1951, when British diplomats Guy Burgess (1911-1963) and Donald Maclean (1913-1983) defected to the USSR. Hitchcock was particularly interested in Maclean’s life in the Soviet Union and his wife Melinda Marling, who followed her husband behind the "Iron Curtain" a year later with their three children.
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