BEFORE: Hitchcock cameos are back, tonight he's seen with a small boy bouncing on his knee in a bus station, carrying over from "Marnie" where he was seen leaving a hotel room.
THE PLOT: An American scientist publicly defects to East Germany as part of a cloak and dagger mission to find the solution for a formula and then figuring out a plan to escape back to the West.
AFTER: This was a pretty lackluster story about a Cold War defection - the only real twist is that it went the opposite way that we're used to, with an American appearing to defect to the other side, and either this didn't happen a lot in real life, or we just didn't hear about it happening. Supposedly his anti-nuclear missile research wasn't getting funding any more - was this supposed to be some kind of early version of SDI?
It seems like Hitchcock sort of forgot the "Show, don't tell" rule again, because there's a lot of lectures at the University of Leipzig and people writing formulas on blackboards, and honestly that's not what many people go to the movies to see. Let's have less of that, and more of the hand-to-hand combat stuff and the escaping from the Commie police stuff.
Even the love story seems kind of half-hearted, lacking in chemistry (but with plenty of physics!) - I know that Prof. Armstrong can't really tip his hand, so he has to act sort of detached and distant, but this has an obvious down side, because he just comes off as a cold fish. And after Hitchcock showed some feminist strides in recent films by showing that women could be thieves and secret agents, the lead female here is relegated to assistant/girlfriend, so that seems like a step backwards.
Also starring Paul Newman (last seen in "What a Way to Go!"), Julie Andrews (last heard in "Despicable Me"), Wolfgang Kieling, Ludwig Donath, Gisela Fischer, Lila Kedrova.
RATING: 4 out of 10 ballet dancers
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