I said that with Lifeboat I had completed all the "major" Hitchcocks, and watching this certainly didn't give the lie to that claim. While it has a few sequences of note, nothing in it is first-tier, and you really feel the 2+ hour length. You can see that it's very similar in structure to North By Northwest, which can also seem a bit deliberately paced in places, but somehow nothing really jerks the picture into life. Not helping at all is Paul Newman, who just seems utterly miscast. He, like the picture, is curiously inert, and the contrast between him and Julie Andrews (with an uncharacteristic haircut), whose simple naturalism works nicely, but just bounces off the usually stone-faced Newman. Perhaps the problem is that his character is a bit of cipher. The basic idea is that Newman (Cary Grant would have done so much more with the role) is a physicist/engineer (the world's youngest and sexiest) who has been working on an anti-missile system (you know, to defuse the nuclear threat of the Cold War) but has hit something of a roadblock. But he knows that there's an East German boffin who's come up with the solution, because he's published a paper on it in some East German journal. So Newman's Michael Armstrong hatches the plan of pretending to defect while at a conference in Stockholm, to gain access to said boffin. Unfortunately, he can't tell anyone, not even Andrews' Sarah Sherman, who is his assistant and fiancée, who nonetheless manages to follow him onto the plane to East Berlin, despite his attempts to shed her. Naturally, he's given a hero's welcome
(because he has already alerted them, in particular the rather sympathetic character of Karl Manfred, who has been on the cruise leading up to the Stockholm conference). Then the rest of the picture is him trotting parts of East Germany, including Leipzig, where the boffin (Professor Gustav Lindt) is based, making contact with various allies and being chased by various suspicious Stasi types, first without Sarah, but then, after he's got what he's after off Lindt (in a tense scene of... writing on a blackboard), with Sarah. Key scenes are a chase through the abandoned Art Museum of East Berlin
(which Jami assures me is full of treasures looted by the Nazis), a fight at a farmhouse, where Michael and a farmer's wife have to kill Michael's follower in an agonizingly slow process that finally involves dragging him bodily over to a gas oven and sticking his head in there until he suffocates! (And then burying him and his motorbike!) and a ride aboard a fake bus from Leipzig back to East Berlin, where the real bus is getting closer, and will alert the cops to the fakery. Oh, and then the actress Lila Kedrova
nearly steals the movie when they're back in East Berlin trying to find a way to sneak out, as a Polish woman contemptuous of the East Germans who wants American sponsors. And, in a typically misogynistic Hitchcock touch, they are almost undone by the vain lead ballerina of a Czech ballet company who cannot forgive Michael for upstaging her when they exit the plane on arriving for the first time in East Berlin. Overall: eminently missable. And that's even with the scenes of Newman and Andrews cavorting in bed at the start, where Newman famously quipped to her about how this would ruin her Mary Poppins image.
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