Topaz: An Example of What I Mean

My preference for films which involve a skillful manipulation of visual imagery is exemplified in another one of Alfred Hitchcock's movies, Topaz. Topaz was released in 1969 and was based on a Leon Uris novel of the same name about the Cuban Missle crisis. The picture I have included is the famous one of the beautiful Cuban spy who is shot and whose dress unfurls as she falls. (This still is from the very end of her fall so, of course, it does not convey what I am talking about very well. Frankly no 'still' would convey it.) It is a memorable scene which virtually every movie reviewer points out. It is, in a sense, like a flower opening (she is beautiful in life, beautiful in death), however, more obviously, it is a stylization of a pool of blood forming. It is quintessential Hitchcock in that he is working within the confines of the structure of the "American movie" of the time but includes moments of European 'artsiness' (Kind of like Haydn and Mozart using the sometimes overly cutesy and transient 'style galant' material of the time, but doing things with it that transcend the genre?) Leonard Maltin called this a "bravura moment" - "it's artistic, poetic, flamboyant, yet it works . . . it is the work of a master."

I agree.

However, what I really want to speak about is the opening sequence - the first ten minutes. There is virtually no dialogue. The only speaking is: 1) a tour guide speaking at the figurine factory (this is PURE background), 2) the Russian father asking for directions to the figurine factory (very unimportant), 3) the Russian teenage daughter phoning the American Embassy from the figurine factory office to ask where they should be to be picked up when they defect (more important - but not as much as it may seem). The whole focus is on the Russian family evading the KGB agents, first at the figurine factory, and then outside the department store. Two sounds, however, are important. The first is the dropping of the porcelain figurine by the daughter so she will be taken to the office (outside of the view of the KGB agent) from where she makes the brief phone call. It is preceded by 30 seconds of almost total silence and I cannot stress how much this is a climax. The second is at the very end of the sequence when they finally escape in the car with the Americans. The daughter cries in her mother's arms partly out of physical pain (she had run into a bicycler while they were escaping and had fallen, painfully scraping her knees), partly out of emotional anguish (the whole painful ordeal of the defection seems to be finally over.)

So two sounds - the sound of porcelain breaking and the sound of a girl crying - are key to the first ten minutes. Everything is conveyed by the visuals and by these sounds. Dialogue is unimportant.

There are two other scenes in which there is a total 'black out' of the dialogue in this movie (a black out of the original scripted dialogue, I believe) - more stylized "bravura moments" which I shall blog on later.