TORN CURTAIN
We sat down to watch our Preshow Entertainment, THE TUBES VIDEO. But it was recorded in the ancient LP mode, and the cheap, lighter than air VCR in the living room wouldn't play it. It reminded us of a time when you had that little knob to adjust the vertical hold. Anyway, we resorted to using the Preshow for November, which was 2 episodes of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS.
We watched an episode called THE THREE DREAMS OF MR. FINDLATER. Sort of like Hitchcock's version of The Twilight Zone's NEXT STOP WILLOUGHBY. A man, to escape the henpecking of his wife, finds tranquility (and a hottie) in a poster for Hawaii. The girl, who is not Carolyn Jones, helps him in his plan to murder his wife. Of course, after 6 months of prep and rehearsal, he comes home on the day of the murder to find his wife died of natural causes. This was not one of the stronger episodes of AHP. Usually, they have a twist where the bad guy is undermined by something. And he is caught at the end. Or, at least you know he will be caught at the end by Hitch's outro words.
And speaking of Hitchcock, the Random Movie selected was-
TORN CURTAIN. One of Hitchcock's last movies, it stars Paul Newman as an American scientist who is defecting to East Berlin, and his fiance Julie Andrews, who knew nothing of this, yet followed him anyway. But is he really defecting?
Accused of having no chemistry between Paul Newman and Mary Poppins, TORN CURTAIN is almost unanimously pegged as weak and, well, bad. But not from me. I love this movie. When I was around 13, I saw a Hitchcock special where they showed the death scene. Hitchcock wanted to show how hard it was to kill a man. When Grobek follows the couple to a remote farmhouse, Paul and the farmer's wife (Hey! THE FARMER'S WIFE is the name of a silent Hitchcock film!) have to kill him. Although both are spies, neither are assassins. They choke him, they punch him, they almost shoot him (she can't do it), they stab him, they bust his kneecaps with a shovel, and ultimately (hi, irony) the German dies with his head in the oven.
The second half of the film is their escape through an underground network. See, I love this. It's an hour of frustration, compounded by quirky characters and wacky circumstances. But I love the whole bus sequence, as they watch the real bus behind them catch up (if it does, they will be exposed as a fake bus). On top of this, we have the woman on the bus that thinks it's too dangerous, the road blocks, the travel agency that is busted when they get there, the wacky woman who wants them to sponsor her so she can go to America, and the diva ballerina, who is sure to upset their plan in the 9th inning. Yeah, I love TORN CURTAIN. Even if I'm the only one.
Here's some info from IMDB...
Bernard Herrmann wrote the original score, but Universal Pictures executives convinced Hitchcock that they needed a more upbeat score. Hitchcock and Herrmann had a major disagreement, the score was dropped and they never worked together again.
Tags: random movie club, torn curtain, the tubes, alfred hitchcock
