Topaz (1969) on Netflix
Copenhagen, 1962. Soviet officer Boris Kusenov defects, and the CIA's Mike Nordstrom learns that Soviet missiles are headed for Cuba. He asks French agent André Devereaux to get proof.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In 1962, Boris Kusenov, a senior Soviet intelligence officer, defects in Copenhagen with his wife and daughter, an operation arranged by the American agent Mike Nordstrom. Kusenov is reluctant to give up much, but he does tell Nordstrom that Soviet military strength is building in Cuba. Washington cannot act on the Cuban file openly because ties with Havana have already broken down. Nordstrom turns to his old friend André Devereaux, a French intelligence agent who works under cover as a commercial attaché, and asks him to take up the matter outside any official French operation. Devereaux agrees. The assignment strains his marriage, and it will take him to Cuba, where Juanita de Cordoba, a widow of the revolution, works in the anti-Castro underground.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Topaz (1969)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Leon Uris left the film after finishing only part of the script; Arthur Laurents refused Hitchcock's offer to complete it, so Samuel A. Taylor, co-writer of Vertigo, was hired, yet shooting began with no finished screenplay and some scenes were written only hours before being filmed.
SPOILER
Because no footage of Granville's suicide existed, Hitchcock built the released third ending from existing footage: Granville is exposed and thrown out of a NATO meeting, and a gunshot heard over an exterior shot of his apartment signals that he kills himself behind drawn curtains.- Hitchcock's first cut ended with a duel between Devereaux and Granville in a French football stadium, filmed by associate producer Herbert Coleman when Hitchcock had to return to the United States for a family emergency; test audiences panned the ending and called the film far too long.
- Philippe de Vosjoli sued Uris, Universal Pictures and MCA Inc, claiming they stole the plot of the novel and film from his unpublished manuscript Le reseau Topaz; he settled out of court, winning half the novel's profits while Uris took the film's profits.
- The story is loosely based on the 1962 Sapphire Affair and on the French spy Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, a friend of Uris who played an important role in helping the United States discover the presence of Russian offensive missiles in Cuba.
- Shel Talmy and William Piggott Brown tried in 1967 to option Leon Uris's novel for $500,000, but the Bank of England halted the deal because of the 1967 devaluation of the pound sterling.
- Hitchcock is said to have approached Sean Connery, who had worked with him on Marnie, to play André, and Catherine Deneuve to play André's wife, though the film ended up with neither star.
- Like Rope and The Trouble with Harry, Topaz was meant as an experiment in whether colors, mainly red, yellow and white, could reveal and influence the plot; Hitchcock later admitted it did not work out.
