Kritiken

It's hard not to feel that Hitch saw you couldn't have a traditional happy ending any longer because the world had grown too incomprehensible. Good and evil were increasingly hard to define. Reviews for these films [Torn Curtain and Topaz] said that Hitch seemed tired and his plotting slack. And while neither film pops like his best work, the bedrock of oblique politics ruptured by spectacular displays of tension and violence still seem quite appropriate.

Like Edgar Allan Foe's "Purloined Letter," Hitchcock's meanings are in full view on the surface of the screen. Hitchcock's direction, such as it is, is not mere decoration but the very shape and substance of his story. We further stipulate that The Torn Curtain is basically a Hitchcockian plot even though Brian Moore receives sole credit for the script.