The Action Scene is a column exploring the construction of action set pieces, but it also considers “scene” in the sense of field or area: “action” as a genre and mode that spans different cultures and historical periods. By examining these two levels in tandem—one oriented toward aesthetic expression, the other toward broader contexts and concepts—this series aims to deepen appreciation for and spark discussion about action cinema.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) is about thresholds. The rent drapery of the title is the most obvious example: the proverbial “iron curtain” that bisected Europe during the Cold War is bypassed by American physicist Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman), who, on behalf of the U.S. government, pretends to defect to East Berlin so that he can steal information from the country’s lead scientist. More interesting, however, are the thresholds that materialize as a result of this larger one. For example, although Michael crosses to the other side knowing his treasonous behavior is just for show, his secretary and fiancé Sarah (Julie Andrews) does not, at least not at first. When she grows suspicious of his elusive behavior and follows him overseas, she finds herself having to choose between her future husband and her country. Thus appears a threshold in her romantic devotion, a point past which love may not be enough.
Then there’s the threshold between the “civilized” society from which Armstrong hails and the dangerous universe of espionage; between a bourgeois world of creature comforts and a no-holds-barred spy game of death and deception; between the abstractions of theory and what one university-based character dismissively calls “mechanics”—the down and dirty working-out of grand governmental schemes. Thresholds are curious things, because you can inch ever closer to one without passing it, thus suggesting that the “continuum” might be a more appropriate figure. Once crossed, however, the impression becomes one of a definitive and irreversible break. This tension between the “break” and the “continuum,” between incremental steps and the moment when a critical mass is palpably reached, drives the emotional tenor of the film’s most harrowing scene, in which Michael, caught in his double dealing, chooses to commit murder.
As the scene is beginning, Michael discovers that the pursuer he thought he’d shaken—an East German security officer named Hermann Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling)—has shown up to the spot where Michael’s just met his local contact. His plans for a quiet departure foiled, our hero ducks indoors and tries to slip out the back with the help of the contact’s German-speaking wife. Too late—Gromek has already burst into the room. And yet, it takes half the scene for things to get physical. Gromek, relishing the experience of cornering his prey, draws out the encounter with excruciating small talk. Hitchcock’s famous dictum about the unexploded bomb beneath the table—detonation brings surprise, but deferral yields suspense—applies here. The fuse has been lit, but we don’t know for how long it’ll burn.
What’s interesting is how even the “explosion” doesn’t happen all at once. It seems to occur in slow motion and a little at a time. In lieu of the long-windup-fast-release strategy of suspense, the film delivers a series of micro-“thresholds” that build to the “threshold” of murder, which is itself an agonizingly protracted, step-by-step process. Up until the killing, we get the feeling that the escalating tension and laborious violence are reversible, but, once the fatal endpoint is reached, there’s no turning back.
Hitchcock, ever the obsessive visual stylist, has the first trace of unrest occur at the level of film form. Gromek, at this point still a room’s length away from Michael, beckons to him to come to the door and points to a Pi symbol traced in the sand, one that our hero had put there earlier and which signifies the organization tasked with smuggling him out of the country. As Michael feigns ignorance, Gromek tugs at the man’s jacket in a menacingly playful, “c’mon now” sort of way.
At that exact moment, Hitchcock cuts to a close-up of Gromek’s pulling motion where the previous framing had been a static two-shot. This close-up lasts for just the duration of the tug—less than a second—which makes it feel all the more jarring: from within the placidity of what is otherwise a clean shot/reverse-shot setup, the sudden cut-in feels like nothing less than an act of violence. Rather than capturing the whole exchange in medium shot, or holding the close-up longer so that viewers are eased into the new scale of framing, Hitchcock opts for sudden, stabbing sharpness, as if to evoke Michael’s surely spiking pulse rate. Furthermore, the close-up, in the way it recedes as quickly as it appears, seems to announce itself less as a total sea change than a prophetic flash, a sign of further rupture to come.
This use of the darting close-up occurs a couple more times throughout the scene, conveying the mounting pressure, the gradual shattering of the peace. As Gromek dials a nearby phone, presumably to report Armstrong and the woman, a bowl of soup crashes in from off-frame, interrupting his call. Suddenly, we get a long shot of the characters from an angle we haven’t seen, a change in perspective to index a shift in the central drama. Indeed, what happens in this shot is pivotal. Whereas roundabout menace had previously given way to verbal bluntness, here, the verbal yields to the physical: Gromek strides toward the woman while reaching for his gun, and Michael lunges to intervene.
A succession of three close-ups—arm around neck, hand gripping arm, hand grabbing gun and casting it away—follows, evoking how the tactility of another’s clothes, muscles, and skin makes disturbingly concrete the mental abstractions of murderous intent. As Michael fights Gromek and the woman seeks a weapon that won’t alert potential witnesses, neither our hero nor his accomplice speaks. Their silence is striking, especially in contrast to Gromek’s verbosity. “Cut it out,” wheezes the officer through pinned windpipe. “Don’t be stupid. I was sent by experts. I can take you—how do you say—one arm tied behind my back.” His half-laughing, half-nervous loquacity is tough to watch because it suggests a man who’s a step behind: still fumbling around in the domain of words when the threshold to physical violence had been crossed long ago.
From a drawer, the woman pulls out a steak knife, and, wielding it blade-down, approaches the struggling men. Filmed at a low angle and with a shadow of a smile on her lips, she looks almost like Norman Bates, inhabiting the queasy space between self-defense and sadism (film writer Michael Walker has noted the many structural similarities between Torn Curtain and Psycho [1960], going so far as to link the woman with Norman’s “mother” from the earlier film). The choice to frame one of the “good guys” in this manner indelibly inflects the violence in the scene, scrambling any clear moral distinctions that are, indeed, a holdover from the civilized world. In fact, the framing of this shot—and this scene in general—complexifies a film that, otherwise, seems to side with Michael, Sarah, and their co-conspirators up to their final, successful escape. In this moment, all in the room are rendered equivalent: agents of death, bodies in peril, pawns in a cruel and unsympathetic game.
The blade pierces Gromek’s neck, but he doesn’t fall until his legs are hit out from under him. Even the fight itself occurs in thresholds: Gromek is taken down seemingly one section of his body at a time. No more words from him at this point, but he flings open a window, presumably to climb out or call for help. This attempt is thwarted, and, after a prolonged struggle in which the officer’s flailing body is dragged across the floor and into an oven with the gas cranked on high, the man breathes his last.
At 40 seconds, the shot in which Gromek dies is one of the longest in the scene. In place of the brisk, staccato cuts of most of the fight, Hitchcock lingers on the stunned silence of the aftermath, the receding adrenaline giving way to the cold hard fact of murder. If each piercing close-up that began with Gromek’s tug enhanced a sense of agitation, of fomenting waters on the verge of boiling over, then this shot, in its corpse-like stasis, feels like finality incarnate. To “boil” means to be in a state of transformation—liquid into air. When in motion, one’s options remain open, dynamic. Once stilled, however, the present becomes past, alternate futures vanish, and the weight of reality is, for the first time, truly felt.