Torn Curtain (1966)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
During the Cold War, an American scientist appears to defect to East Germany as part of a cloak and dagger mission to find the formula for a resin solution—but the plan goes awry when his fiancee, unaware of his motivation, follows him across the border.
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What critics compared Torn Curtain to
Anderson names "The Lady Vanishes," "The 39 Steps," "Sabotage" and "Torn Curtain" as specific inspirations.
The visualization of the sequence pulls elements from a similar scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain."
A third act knife fight is reminiscent of Hitchcock's Torn Curtain , as every puncture wound is felt in the audience's own guts - phantom stabs that make us squirm in our seats.
A long scene in which the ’roided-out gang tries to murder a hostage and fails repeatedly recalls a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain in which Paul Newman and Julie Andrews discover how hard it is to kill a man.
Watts is equally fine, but her character has nothing in the line of Mortensen's visceral, vital, and very nude bathhouse battle â a grueling, almost unwatchably physical sequence that rivals the farmhouse murder in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain for sheer, sweaty realism.
And in this sense, it reminds me of both the excruciatingly protracted struggle between Paul Newman and the Russian agent in "Torn Curtain," and the knock-down, drag-out fist-fest between Keith David and Rowdy Roddy Piper in John Carpenter's "They Live!
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Unfortunately, they are played out in such a flatfooted fashion that you’re likely to be reminded not of “Foreign Correspondent,” “Saboteur” or “Notorious” but of the missteps of his later years like “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz.”
It was Hitchcock, after all, who loved taking innocuous objects and locations and turning them sinister: the bread knife in "Blackmail," the country kitchen in "Torn Curtain" and, most notoriously, the shower in "Psycho.
Not one of the Master of Suspense’s classic thrillers, but the top-heavy international late-career Hitch of “Topaz” and “Torn Curtain.”
…think “Torn Curtain” ? with today’s bumper crop of high-tech espionage thrillers.
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Well, how's this?: Arrive expecting to see “Kill Bill” mixed with “The Wild Bunch” by way of “Cinema Paradiso” and Hitchcock's “Torn Curtain,” and you'll get a vague idea of what you're in for — a brawny, rollicking mash-up that is a passionate exploration of the power of filmmaking from one of our finest directors and writers.
…by anachronistically merging two dissimilar and outdated movie formulas — the Elvis Presley rock musical and the World War II epic — and adding elements from cold war thrillers like Torn Curtain for good measure.