I'll Never Forget Whatsisname: John Vernon, Page 2

I'LL NEVER FORGET WHATSISNAME:
A TRIBUTE TO CHARACTER ACTORS

JOHN VERNON, PAGE 2

TOPAZ (1969)

What comes instantly to your mind when you hear the name Hitchcock? Is it overblown suspense set pieces or boring scenes of people being followed? Both are incessant throughout his work, and it's hard to say which detracts more from what people claim is good about the reputed Master's movies, but it's the scenes of people being followed that spring to the front of my mind. Even his most beloved classics suffer from an interminable amount of screentime dedicated to one person trailing another: Robert Walker stalking the wife at the carnival in Strangers on a Train; Vertigo's Jimmy Stewart in his car following Kim Novak around hilly, back-projected San Francisco; the cop who trails Janet Leigh to the dealership in the most drawn out and dispensable stretch of Psycho, etc.* Even Hitch's staunchest defenders have to admit that these types of sequences are sadistically stagnant and dawdling, especially considering they're of people moving, and that Hitchcock never really found a way to make them aesthetically rewarding the way Brian De Palma did with (John Vernon's Point Blank co-star) Angie Dickinson traversing the labyrinthine gallery of the Met in Dressed to Kill. The director may have tricked the audience into believing these scenes are riveting by placing heart-stopping Bernard Herrmann scores on top of them, and this might explain why their flatness is more apparent in Hitchcock's later movies, made after his collaboration with Herrmann infamously ended following the rejection of the composer's score for Torn Curtain.

Hitchcock doesn't even try to incorporate Maurice Jarre's music into the opening of Topaz, a suspense-free ten minute sequence of a dour Russian diplomat, his manish wife and apparently mentally handicapped adult daughter** feining interest in cheap ceramics in a shop in Copenhagen while agents circle around the background. The agents also don't give a shit about the painstakingly sculpted terracotta - they want to prevent the disenchanted diplomat from hooking up with his CIA buddies and defecting to the west, yet fail spectacularly when the family rushes to the safety of a car and are spirited away to Washington D.C., where the diplomat proves he was worth all the trouble of extracting him by providing the information that, yes, there positively may in all likelihood be some sort of operation called Topaz and, absolutely, it possibly exists.

Leonard Maltin once said that it's "ungrateful" to bash Hitchcock's later movies, which to me sounds like forgiving the Holocaust because Hitler helped create the Volkswagen. Just because his earlier films are universally praised doesn't change the fact that Hitch's final five movies are largely unremarkable when, like Marnie and Frenzy, they aren't just outright unpleasant to watch (and that's giving you guys The Birds - just giving it to you as if it wasn't fundamentally ridiculous from start to finish and actually belonged in the "classic" canon next to such venerated titles as Rope, Vertigo and Psycho). Frustrated by the veteran filmmaker's conflict between whether to deliver light entertainment or delve into dark psychological territory, these films waffle between two vastly dissimilar tones that produce one or two curious moments but for the most part end up being overproduced and overcomplicated. Of course I would argue that this wasn't really anything new for the director, but by the mid-60's the "Hitchcock fun" started to feel a lot more forced and the films were prone to relying more and more on his obligatory stylistic fixtures.

Take for instance the circumstances of Hitch's trademark cameo in Topaz, which perfectly represents his directorial indecision: the big man is rolled into a scene at the airport (where the international plot is poised to take off) seated in a wheelchair - he promptly emerges from the chair, shakes hands with another man and walks offscreen. The director literally changes his mind in the middle of a shot and turns an already distracting dumb in-joke into a personal cry for attention that halts the proceedings, second-guessing his decision to more or less leave the movie alone in favor of emphasizing his own auteuristic presence throughout. Possibly because of the break up with Bernie, Hitchcock's big gimmick here is based on silence: the unscored opening (pierced by the shattering of a statuette!), two guys sharing a 2001-style inaudible conversation in a greenhouse, a lead character's fate sealed by one person whispering into the ear of another, a key villain who's given more gestures than dialogue and, most notably, a long sequence of the movie's hero Rear Window-ing a fellow spy through binoculars as he chats with a potential turncoat across the street. What could have been an artistic hark back to Hitchcock's beginnings as the director of silent films instead feels like an outdated hook informed by arrogance: There is no sound because script and music are unnecessary! I am Hitchcock! Who are Maurice Jarre and Samuel A. Taylor*** compared to me!? Whether the director's ego actually played a part in his aesthetic choices is pure spectulation on my part, but needless to say, making long stretches of silence the emphasis of a scrawling, multi-character, globe-spanning espionage mystery-thriller is at best self-defeating.

Signing on to direct a bestselling potboiler by a hot author must have seemed like a no-brainer for a venerated veteran looking to get back to the ol' reliable international spy thriller in the mold of early career hits The 39 Steps and Foreign Correspondent (who was apparently unconcerned with the largely indifferent reception of the international spy thriller he'd just made). The problem with this approach in the late 60's and the already pretty stale setting of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that the villains weren't as easily characterized as in the pre- and post-WWII era of intrigue. For a director whose plots so frequently focus on the paranoid plight of an individual forced to jump through the hoops of government, federal or corporate machinations of which they are unaffiliated, demonizing the heads of the Cuban revolution so soon after the overthrow of Batista is a tricky proposition to say the least. It just doesn't work for a man who once admitted to being terrified of the police to put a black hat on Castro while championing a French agent who manipulates parties on both sides to his own dispassionate ends. If one consistent aspect defines the Golden Era of Hitchcock, it's agreeable heroes who are common joes - wrong men in the wrong places at the wrong time whose good natures are compromised by the collusion of minacious agencies. We're meant to side with them, and stick with them throughout the whole movie to the climax, during which they are inevitably hanging off something, an apartment window or the cliff of Mount Rushmore or what have you, the point being that we've shared in their adventure and dangers all the way and theortically don't want them to plunge to their deaths.

The fact that Frederick Stafford's André Devereaux, a snobby French spy/social darling, never comes within a mile of anything from which he could conceivably plunge, never has a gun pointed in his direction or even an ominous figure following him for an intolerable amount of screentime, doesn't exactly endear him to us. More than just avoid trouble, Devereaux actively stays out of danger by subcontracting any derring-do to minor characters. First, he talks buddy Roscoe Lee Browne (of future Babe and Smiley Face narrating duties) into exposing himself as a spy and risking his life by bluffing his way into the temporary headquarters of Cuban revolutionary bigshot Rico Parra in Harlem and snapping shots of secret files. Later, in the closest thing the final cut of the movie could claim as a climax, Devereaux sends his son-in-law to confront the bad guy! Did James Bond ever send his son-in-law to take care of business?? It's not even like the botched finale of Spellbound, where the entire movie's been about Gregory Peck but his character's suddenly absent from the final scene - this guy Devereaux does practically nothing in the film, except put other people in danger and get them killed. Most significantly, he waltzes into Cuba and seduces his double agent mistress into securing photos of Soviet missile sites for him (she in turn sublets these duties to her domestic staff, who are subsequently caught and tortured) then leaves her to die. It's never suggested that we're not supposed to be rooting for this guy, even as he plays foreigners and minorities off each other with no fear of reprisal: the closest he comes to personal harm is discovering that his wife is having an off-screen affair with old Resistance pal Michel Piccoli, who happens to be the ringleader of Topaz (d'oh!) Which may or may not be just deserts for him swearing up and down to her that he's not passing it to his sexy Cuban contact, which he most definitely is.

It's this affair, the one that confirms our "hero" is as big a manipulative liar in his personal life as his professional one, from which Hitch attempts to mold an Old Hollywood romance along the lines of North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief, complete with moonlit dinner under a Cuban twilight. The subplot only occupies the middle of the film, yet the intention to highlight it is clear from the opening scene: as part of the defector's daughter's ploy to distract agents at the ceramic store, she drops a porcelain facsimile of a loving couple in mid-smootch, predicting the plot of lovers whose lives will be torn apart by all the behind-the-scenes espionage! But Stafford's Cuban culata llamar doesn't ignite any explosives or make the characters any more sympathetic. For one thing, the affair is carried on between two non-stars: German actress Karin Dor, most famous for taking a swim in Donald Pleasance's piranha pond in You Only Live Twice, and Czech/French actor Stafford, most famous for being the guy from Topaz whose career didn't take off. Again, you have to wonder if it was pure arrogance - I don't need big stars! I'M the star! - brought about by well-publicized disputes with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews on Torn Curtain that led Hitchcock to cast lesser known actors, and whether he honestly thought the allure from his various love subplots was a result of his own adeptness in the director's chair rather than the magnetism of a pair of spit-and-polished celebs. In any case, Montgomery Clift could be playing Devereaux and it wouldn't change the fact that the fling's a fraud: he just wants to use Dor's Juanita de Cordoba - widow of a martyred first hour revolutionary - for her connections to Castro & co., then head back to the U.N. to take all the credit, leaving her to suffer the consequences. What a superlative asshole! Especially since the man he's convinced her to betray genuinely loves her and, thanks to Agent Quick Bang, is forced to shoot her dead to save face and spare her the inevitable torture sessions she's sure to be subjected to.

If there's one notable aspect of Topaz it's how essential the film is to the evolution of John Vernon's jaded, mistrusting disposition. So far as I can tell it's his biggest role, at least for the section of the movie that he appears in. Following the prologue in Copenhagen, the film is basically divided into three specific sections - New York, Havana and Paris - and Vernon dominates as the heavy from the second half of the New York sequence throughout the scenes in Cuba. From the second he turns up as disheveled socialist Rico Parra, he's instantly suspicious of Roscoe Lee Browne's claim to be a commiserating liberal journalist writing a think piece for Ebony (it would have been funnier if he said he was from Jet). Turns out Parra's paranoia is not unfounded, and he's fooled by a member of the minority community he sought to create solidarity with. Then along comes Devereaux, Frenchin' it up in Parra's own backyard, saddling up to his special señorita like he's Eric Stratton propositioning Dean Wormer's wife at the supermarket. Parra isn't well dressed and spiffy like the dapper hero: he's grungy and unkempt, wears laundry day fatigues in the finest Castro tradition, smokes messy cigars instead of classy cigarettes. Even his official papers at the hotel have greasy hamburger stains on them - all in keeping with the "middleman" status that underlined all of Vernon's insecure villains. But is he even honestly the villain here? Even if his cause is dubious, at least he's got one. He's fought to get where he is and continues to struggle in the effort to maintain his country's independence; like Vernon's subsequent characters, he's accepted a vulernable position of responsibility that's threatened by the fly-by-night antics of a no-account agent provocateur.

What's more, Parra puts all that at risk - everything he's dedicated his life to - out of love. Even shooting Juanita to save her from torture is more a gesture of love than anything offered by the "hero" who uses her, gets her caught and then hightails it out of there. The obvious parallel is Claude Rains in Notorious: I've always felt a strange tinge of pity for that character at the end of the movie. How am I supposed to not feel bad for Rains who, despite being a uranium-smuggling expatriate Nazi, clearly loves Ingrid Bergman's infiltrating seductress? Like Karin Dor's belleza máxima, Bergman is not only beautiful but, as the daughter of a deceased Nazi hero, derivative of her suitor's decimated socialist ardor. It makes it that much more tragic that it's all been a lie, for Rains to realize that instead of someone who'll love her unequivocally she prefers callous Cary Grant, who only intercedes on Bergman's behalf when she's at the brink of death and he has nothing to risk career-wise, sauntering off leaving Rains high and dry with his bloodthirsty Nazi buddies. Not that Rains isn't clearly the villain, and ultimately unsympathetic, but being bullied by his evil mother to torturously dispatch his gorgeous mole is vastly more interesting to watch than Bergman sneaking around wine cellars. At least Grant's struggle between his love for Bergman and duty towards his country makes his aloofness somewhat excusable - you never get that sense of inner conflict from Devereaux, who for all we know is already chatting up some stewardess on the flight outta Cuba at the same time Juanita's housekeeper is mopping her freshly-excreted blood off the floor (actually I guess all her servants got arrested and tortured...who's gonna clean up that mess?)

It reminds me of what I wrote about Pat Hingle's small role in Nevada Smith: McQueen's hero manipulates his way into the swamp prison where Hingle works as a foreman, so he can get revenge on a prisoner - he doesn't give a shit what consequences his actions will have for Hingle or those involved, they're all just pawns in his plans of vengeance, and those consequences are that Hingle's life is ruined and a pretty girl is dead. The effect all this has on Parra has ripples throughout every future role Vernon would play: you can picture him seeing André Devereaux, the smug, diplomatically-protected philanderer who comes and goes without personal consequence while ruining everything for everyone else, in each little subversive snot at Faber College (at one point Devereaux infers that two and two equal eight, suggesting his G.P.A. would be about Delta average). It's a step up emotionally from his part in Point Blank: just compare the look of anguish after Parra's pulled the trigger and slowly releases Juanita's lifeless body to Mal's cutting glare at Angie Dickinson once he's realized she set him up and reluctantly allows her to squirm from his grip, a look that says "If I didn't have a gun pointed at my head I would tear you apart as slowly as humanly possible." Juanita's betrayal is absolute, a vindication that capitalists really are trying to corrupt the women of his country and that every amiable outsider claiming to be an ally is in fact a scheming saboteur. No wonder it was so easy for Vernon to unhesitantly try and murder Ernest in cold blood, 20 years later.

One reason I think defenders concede Hitchcock his duds of the 60's and 70's is that the director's apathy practically bleeds into the aesthetic of those late films. What was once admissible as black comedy had given way to misanthropy and misogyny, and whether you believe Hitch was a genuine pervert or just playfully pushing the limits of the Hollywood Production Code his temperaments were decidedly more dispassionate in the final two decades of his career.**** As such, he had clearly gotten bored with his ordinary, morally unimpeachable schlubs and turned his appreciation towards audacious villains. This of course played into his own brand of morbid humor: making villains more appealing than the lead was always Hitchcock's ploy to subvert his audience's expectations. Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt is more a mouthpiece for the director's cynical worldview than the ignorant small town yahoos who've fallen under Uncle Charlie's spell. In Strangers on a Train, Robert Walker's outside thinking and adventurousness, though in service of murder, is more compelling than the banal concerns of straight arrow Farley Granger. The anxiety over the noose tightening around Ray Milland in the second half of Dial M for Murder as his nefarious plan is picked apart piece by piece is just as palpable as the murderer stalking Grace Kelly in the film's first half; similarly, the tension of Rope is based on whether the body will be discovered and the murderous couple's deed divulged; before long you even start to feel nervous for big Raymond Burr sweating under the scrutiny of that intrusive voyeurist James Stewart in Rear Window. Then of course there's the car that stops sinking for a second in Psycho, a comedic moment of empathy for a killer which Hitchcock later returned to more obscenely when Barry Foster desperately tries to retrieve incriminating evidence from the rigor mortis-tightened hand of his victim in Frenzy. Sympathy for the devil was always a sentiment of Hitchcock's, even when it was a case of flat-out baddies in The Lady Vanishes or North by Northwest, but as his heroes became less scrupulous - an androphobic thief, an alleged wife beater, a pair of con artists - deviant criminals like Barry Foster in Frenzy and Willam Devane and Karen Black in Family Plot became more richly drawn characters by default: the heroes in Hitchcock's late films are practically non-existent***** (oh but let's have another knee-slapping scene of what an awful cook the cop's wife is in Frenzy - that shit is priceless).

That's certainly the case in Topaz, which works to John Vernon's advantage. He plays the best character in the movie, even if it's the kind of part that's hard to take seriously (I kept thinking of the guerilla leader in Woody Allen's Bananas) and it's weird to have a Castro surrogate in a movie where Castro himself is constantly mentioned and appears via newsreel footage. While Parra is depicted more of a Castro than a Camilo Cienfuegos or Juan Almeida Bosque - he even stays at the Hotel Theresa in New York, as Castro & his entourage famously did in 1960 when he met with Khrushchev****** (I guess that would make Juanita Che Guevera's widow or something?) - he's very specifically NOT Castro. Which is actually perfect: Vernon could never be a Castro. Of course he's got authority, but he's not the head cheese - he still has to carry out orders and answer to higher-ups, otherwise he probably would have just pardoned Juanita and used his diplomatic clout to have Devereaux extradited back to Cuba for a swift trial and speedy execution. But like the frustrated Vernon figureheads to come, he doesn't have that kind of power and can only intimidate his enemies when they wander into his limited territory. Even then his plans are foiled: he lets his feelings for Juanita overrule his instinct to immediately arrest and interrogate Devereaux, instead keeping him on double secret probation until the fox manages to fly the coop.

Parra has a tenuous grasp at best on his claim to authority and can't for a second drop his harsh resolve - it's all he can do to make a mercy killing seem like a cold execution to his soldiers. Parra's not presented as a bad person: sure, he may dispatch the occasional insubordinate male secretary but his first lines show that he's rational, and not a hellbent terrorist, as he discourages some headstrong radicals from bombing the Statue of Liberty (thus stalling the rise of the planet of the apes?) But he runs with a bad crew, like Rains in Notorious, who expect him to bring down the hammer on enemy operatives and inhouse turncoats. When the beaten and barely alive conspiring housekeeping couple are ready to give up Juanita, there's even some asshole underling who demands Parra hear for himself who the traitor is so he can take sadistic pleasure observing Parra getting his heart broken. And what a significant moment it is: the maid whispering the name into Parra's ear, his hands sliding up off his knees as he straightens up - in the next shot we get his evil face, as striking a transformation as Jekyll into Hyde. What we're witnessing here is no less than the birth of John Vernon: his cheerful passion turned bitter, hollow, intolerant. Up to this point Parra's been kind of playfully evil, like "Oh, they took photos of my secret documents with a spy camera? Ha ha, must be Tuesday. Go try to shoot them." But here it's the real deal - the one person in the world he thought he could trust has betrayed him; his ideals are in flux, since Juanita's not only his mistress but a pinup girl for the cause he's dedicated his entire life to, he's probably questioning for the first time whether or not he's playing for the right side. Hitchcock recognizes and revels in one of Vernon's most underrated features, his dazzling blue eyes that betray vulnerability beneath a hard exterior. You practically see them fade to gray - as colorless as pure topaz! - as he rises from the shattered shell of his loose-lipped prisoner.

Vernon's transition into the Vernon we all love to hate is consecrated in blood in the most Hitchcocky moment of the movie, the only shot from Topaz - maybe from any late Hitchcock movie - you'll ever find in a series of clips highlighting the director's signature visuals. Holding Juanita close to his chest, Parra shoots her through the heart then slowly allows her to fall, her skirt spilling across the tiled floor like blood. I have to admit that, obvious as the overhead shot may be, it looks beautiful, even if you can see the strings pulling the hem of the skirt in different directions.******** The execution of this moment and the close-up of Vernon's hand sliding off his knees are as cheesy as any of Hitch's previous gimmicks, but weirdly enough they feel welcome in such a joyless, uninspired lull of a movie...or maybe it's just that Vernon is the only character it's even possible to give a shit about, and these are his moments. And they're so precisely Vernon-esque they couldn't possibly have worked without him: I can picture how stupid they'd look if Rico Parra was played by James Mason or Martin Landau (in this case, not casting a star actually worked well for Hitchcock). That's not just Juanita's blood/dress draining into the linoleum: it's everything decent and accepting in John Vernon's soul. It's impossible not to feel for Parra as he leaves Juanita's lifeless body where it lay, exiting the house in a trace, the gun still hanging at his side; you have to admit, a bullet is a better gift than what Suave McFrenchy brought for her: a Geiger counter! So she can detect nuclear warheads and do his job for him! That's like Homer Simpson giving Marge a bowling ball for her birthday.

I won't even bother going into the well-documented, Vernon-less mess that is the film's final third: suffice to mention that there's a shot of a character casually entering his house followed immediately by the sound of a gunshot, which we're supposed to understand is meant to imply he committed suicide. Kind of ironic that Hitchcock should rely on silence the entire movie only to render the whole thing irredeemably silly with a single sound effect. The last thing I'll mention about the film itself is Hitchcock's weird focusing on knees. I don't know if he'd been watching Bresson movies or what, but the shot of Parra's hands moving off his knees as he straightens up after learning of Juanita's betrayal seems visually linked to an earlier one of the defector's daughter's scrapped knees after making her way to the getaway car and being whisked away to the states. Both moments are presented as bizarrely sexual: the defector looks on disapprovingly as his American liasion leers at his daughter's exposed legs from the front seat and Parra moves intimately close to the tortured snitch like a reluctant lover. I can't think of knee fetishism popping up in Hitchcock's other movies, although I can see it being easy to miss in something like the shower scene from Psycho.

As far as performance, Vernon (who was of Armenian, German, and Polish descent) pulls off the Hispanic background and accent surprisingly well. His appearance in this movie seemed to inspire his casting in two different Mission: Impossible adventures of the early 70's: he basically reprises the Parra character as General Ramon Sabattini in a three-part episode called "The Falcon" in which his sexy scheme to take over his native country by forcing a young princess to marry him is thwarted by Leonard Nimoy pretending to be a party magician - true story!******** Then he played Ramone Fuego, who gets seduced by Lesley Ann Warren and forced to help the IMF team steal a dead body. A weird connection to Vernon's M:I character Sabattini and his role as the mayor in Dirty Harry: apparently his politicans have a predilection for golden telephones. Who knows what connection this odd detail has to Mr. Dollars' golden penis, or how 1977's Golden Rendezvous fits into all this (in which he apparently played another Hispanic man, Luis Carreras).

Final note: I really wanted to include 1969's Tell Them Willie Boy is Here, the blacklisted Abraham Polonsky's directorial comeback 30 years after Force of Evil and an early western for Vernon. The movie was on Netflix Instant but got dropped when the Starz contract fell through.

NEXT WEEK: Vernon v.s. Caine! Pleasance v.s. kleenex! Reunited with Don Siegel in THE BLACK WINDMILL

* Somehow, Gus Van Sant made this same sequence, with James Remar as the patrolman, absolutely captivating in his remake. I don't know if it was just Remar's natural mystique or what, but it's impressive.

** Seriously, I couldn't tell how old this character was supposed to be. She behaves and reacts to things like a 5-year-old, yet she's awkwardly tall and stumbles over things, in one case falling into the street, nearly botching her family's last minute rescue.

*** No seriously, who IS Samuel A. Taylor? He's the co-author of Vertigo, brought in to finish Topaz after Leon Uris left, supposedly because Uris refused to incorporate any Hitchcock "humor" in the script. Taylor would write sequences mere hours before they were shot, possibly explaining why silence was such a necessity throughout most of the movie.

**** What brought about Hitchcock's late career apathy is its own article, but to sum it up I'd say the complicated, conflicting opinion of Hitchcock as a Serious Artist championed by proponents of the auteur theory at the same time his films were starting to be considered formulaic and outdated must have made him both pompous and resentful. He didn't do himself any favors late in his career by struggling with whether to stick with his classical approach or try something new and interesting like so many of his adoring young contemporaries.

***** Don't want to stray too off-topic, but consider this from Truffaut/Hitchcock, the most fascinating back and forth of ego stroking and excuse-making ever published, and a solid example of the hero worship heaped upon Hitchcock that changed the way he made films; it's through these sessions that you can see Hitchcock is being made aware of what his admirers have picked up on in his work. Here they're discussing 1950's Stage Fright...

Hitch: "Why are none of the people ever in danger? Because we're telling a story in which the villains themselves are afraid. The great weakness of the picture is that it breaks an unwritten law: The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture. That's a cardinal rule, and in this picture the villain was a flop!"

FT: "The better the villain, the better the picture...that's an excellent formula! It's true that the reason why Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train were so great is that Claude Rains, Joseph Cotten and Robert Walker were your three best villains."

That exchange is a bit contradictory, not to mention subjective. I mean, wasn't Vertigo just named the best film of all time by the BFI? Can YOU remember who played the bad guy in that one? It's Tom Helmore, and he never even gets to reveal himself as the villain to Jimmy Stewart - in fact he disappears entirely from the final reel of the movie. The problem with Stage Fright's villain, if you consider it the movie's biggest problem (it's not), isn't that he's afraid per se, it's that he's elusive. We're tricked - visually, by the director, in flashback, to believe that the murderer is innocent, one of Hitchcock's famous "wrong men," when in fact he's very guilty - so the audience has been tricked into rooting for the villain. Fucking with the narrative is a classic gimmick of Hitchcock's dating back to his very first creative endeavor, the short story "Gas" he had published in 1919 in which the perceived killer stalking a woman turns out to be the hallucinatory effect of anaesthetic while in the dentist's chair. She was never in danger, which by Hitchcock's own formula renders the story unsuccessful. Anyway, the examples I gave in the above paragraph of moments where the audience is meant to empathize with the bad guy all go against what Hitchcock is claiming his approach to villains is. And here are three more: Claude Rains' dread that his Nazi pals will find out his wife is a spy, Joseph Cotten nervously watching to see if his niece falls into his trap and Robert Walker dropping the cigarette lighter in the storm drain.

****** So, in real life, was there a French double agent who helped the Soviets set up missile silos in Cuba? Where's this all coming from anyway? There's just no connection. I guess it all falls on pulpy, pseudo-historical, self-serious Leon Uris. You know he inspired Harvey Weinstein to become a movie producer? The big guy's dream has always been to adapt Mila 18 to the screen.

******* Did Hitchcock make it obvious on purpose, just so nobody would incorrectly assume the blood-dress effect was a happy accident? Just how worried was Hitchcock that his directorial touches would go unnoticed?

******** I haven't seen a lot of M:I episodes, so I'm not sure if this was the only time they used it or it was a staple of the series, but the whole "hallway-sized screen" that agents hide behind from the last movie - the Brad Bird one - is utilized to good effect in this episode.

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