Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, and Lila Kedrova are all miscast in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s worst films, Torn Curtain
TORN CURTAIN (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966)
Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Film
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, June 21, and Wednesday, June 27
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
MoMA is screening Alfred Hitchcock’s 1966 Cold War thriller, Torn Curtain, in its “Modern ‘Matinees’: Hitchcock/Truffaut, Fashionably Late” series, but don’t let that convince you that it’s museum-worthy. Torn Curtain is one of the Master of Suspense’s worst movies, and it never really had a chance. Hitchcock wanted Vladimir Nabokov to write it, but ultimately hired novelist Brian Moore to write the screenplay, then had Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall attempt to polish it. Hitch had little choice in Universal’s miscasting of the leads, Paul Newman and Julie Andrews; Hitchcock had no love for the former’s Method acting, and Andrews was on a tight schedule that affected her availability. He rejected Bernard Herrmann’s original score and replaced it with one by John Addison. The film was photographed and edited by television veterans John F. Warren and Bud Hoffman, respectively. And it was made on a limited budget, so Hitchcock’s “realistic Bond” picture relied on stand-in locations. The story was inspired by the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, British diplomats who were members of the Cambridge Five spy ring; they defected to Russia in 1951.
In Torn Curtain, Newman is rocket scientist Michael Armstrong; Andrews is Sarah Sherman, his assistant and fiancée. Unhappy with the status of one of his projects, Armstrong decides to defect to East Germany and work with missile expert Gustav Lindt (Ludwig Donath). However, Armstrong does not anticipate Sherman following him and deciding to defect as well. Once in East Berlin Armstrong is trailed by security spy Hermann Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling), visits with a mysterious farmer (Mort Mills) and his wife (Carolyn Conwell), encounters the kooky Countess Kuchinska (Lila Kedrova), and meets such underground figures as Dr. Koska (Gisela Fischer) and Mr. Jacobi (David Opatoshu). The narrative is filled with plot holes and scenes that lack the tension Hitchcock is treasured for. Even the much-ballyhooed rural murder scene is awkward, though brutal. And the bus chase is torturous. Thus, Hitchcock’s fiftieth film is nothing special; nor would his next outing be, another Hollywood political thriller, Topaz. He would ultimately regain his form with 1972’s Frenzy, a British production written by Anthony Shaffer. Torn Curtain is screening June 21 at 1:30 and June 27 at 7:00 at MoMA; “Modern ‘Matinees’: Hitchcock/Truffaut, Fashionably Late” continues through July 4 with such other Hitchcock fare as The Paradine Case, Psycho, Saboteur, Spellbound, Suspicion, Rebecca, and Rear Window.
“Okwui’s job is to scare people, just to scare them to get them to kind of wake up,” dancer, choreographer, and conceptualist Ralph Lemon says of his frequent collaborator and protégée Okwui Okpokwasili in the powerful documentary Bronx Gothic, which is being shown on the terrace of the Museum of the City of New York on June 19, kicking off the uptown institution’s “Moonlight & Movies” outdoor program, part of the second annual “Smile, It’s Your Close Up: New York’s Documentaries” series, a joint venture with the Maysles Documentary Center. Directed by Okpokwasili’s longtime friend Andrew Rossi, who will introduce the screening, the film follows Okpokwasili during the last three months of her tour for her semiautobiographical one-woman show, Bronx Gothic, a fierce, confrontational, yet heart-wrenching production that hits audiences right in the gut. Rossi cuts between scenes from the show — he attached an extra microphone to Okpokwasili’s body to create a stronger, more immediate effect on film — to Parkchester native Okpokwasili giving backstage insight, visiting her Nigerian-born, Bronx-based parents, and spending time with her husband, Peter Born, who directed and designed the show, and their young daughter, Umechi. The performance itself begins with Okpokwasili already moving at the rear of the stage, shaking and vibrating relentlessly, facing away from people as they filter in and take their seats.
Thomas Piper’s Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf is a beautifully composed documentary that unfolds much as flowers and plants grow, evolving over fall, winter, spring, summer, and then fall again. In 2014-15, Piper followed innovative Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf as he visited gardens around the world and developed a brand-new one, Durslade Farm, for the Hauser & Wirth Somerset gallery in Bruton, England, which will ultimately be home to fifty-seven thousand plants. For more than thirty years, Oudolf has taken a unique, radical approach to gardens, as demonstrated in the 1999 book Dreamplants: A New Generation of Garden Plants, which he cowrote with garden designer and writer Henk Gerritsen. “I wanted to go away from traditional planting, [using] plants that were not seen in gardens but were very good garden plants. The more difficult thing was to learn what plants do,” Oudolf tells Hermannshof Garden director Cassian Schmidt in the film. “Your work teaches people to see things they were unable to see,” designer and photographer Rick Darke says to Oudolf as they walk through White Clay Creek Preserve in Landenberg, Pennsylvania. In designing his gardens, Oudolf first creates a multicolored blueprint that is a work of art in itself, like abstract drawings and paintings. He combines plants that would never be together in the wild. “It may look wild, but it shouldn’t be wild. This is what you’d like to see in nature,” he explains in his home base, the lovely Oudolf Garden in Hummelo, where he’s lived with his wife, Anja and their children since 1982. For him, it’s not just about color or size but about character. “I put plants onstage and I let them perform,” he says.
