Hitchcock truly was a master of his craft. You'd think regurgitating tropes and motifs from previously in his career would make lesser products after the fact, but Hitch somehow improved. Not only is the spy thriller recycled here, so is the every day person fighting the elite. There are two major things going on in the wrongly misaligned Topaz that stretch the fabric of cinema at large. 

The first is Hitch returned to the straight spy-thriller that he initially dug his…

mathematical logic and romantic inconsistency...

This is certainly no Vertigo or Rear Window but it may very well be Hitch’s best cat and mouse thriller, an espionage tale with intense themes. Torn Curtain has a rather terrible reputation. One that gets more dislike than it should because what makes it great are attributes that directly clash with typical filmmaking techniques (feeling disted, stagnant sequences, how the leads feel inconsistent, etc). 

What makes Torn Curtain work on a cinematic level is…

It feels absolutely wrong to give something so filled with artistic vision, creative heartache, and endless amounts of time anything less than the near perfect or perfect score. Yet as much as I love stop-motion, this does not allow me to give this feature full praise. For something that has now taken 30 years to come to fruition, it makes sense that there is so little in way of narrative and we are instead gifted with a world so full…

I was eleven years old when I first laid eyes upon the lone fiddler on roller skates that corralled the onlooking-people to the sepia-toned roller rink. Then the rich folksy, blue-grass rhythms ed hands with the golden dust that bounced off the wooden floorboards. It was an infectious, utterly hypnotic moment for me. I finding a seat next to my grandfather (on his couch that would engulf any human within its infinite leather folds) and feeling the warmth come…