BEFORE: Just three films left in the Hitchcock chain now, but he's still making cameos. Tonight Hitch appears as a man getting out of a wheelchair at an airport.
THE PLOT: A French intelligence agent becomes embroiled in the Cold War politics first with uncovering the events leading up to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and then back to France to break up an international Russian spy ring.
AFTER: Well, clearly Hitchcock got obsessed with the Cold War, after doing a film where a prominent U.S. figure defects to the East, he did a story where the opposite took place. This plot starts off with a key Soviet figure defecting to the West.
I have two main problems with this film - first, the French diplomat who is a minor character for the first hour of the film becomes the central character for the second hour, and that ends up feeling like we sort of changed horses in mid-stream. In part one I'm supposed to feel like this Soviet defection is very important, but then in the 2nd half, the film focuses on some high-placed Soviet spies in France, and I'm very fuzzy on what the connection is between these two things. Or is the connection just the one guy who happens to be present in both places?
Second problem - both storylines are boring as hell. What happened? Isn't spy stuff supposed to be exciting? With a few exceptions, this is just people sitting in rooms, having meetings, and calling each other on the phone. Jeez, if I wanted to see that, I'd just go to my office. I fell asleep several times, because there was so much talky-talk here. This is why James Bond doesn't go to meetings, he's out there in the field blowing stuff up.
Also starring Frederick Stafford, John Vernon (last seen in "Dirty Harry"), John Forsythe (last seen in "The Trouble With Harry"), Roscoe Lee Browne (last seen in "Legal Eagles"), Philippe Noiret, Michel Piccoli, Karin Dor (last seen in "You Only Live Twice").
RATING: 3 out of 10 porcelain statuettes
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