13 Times You Lost Respect For Your Favourite Filmmakers

13. Alfred Hitchcock - Torn Curtain

It is common knowledge that Alfred Hitchcock started to lose a step or two as he got older. The brilliant madman behind classics like Spellbound, North By Northwest, Vertigo and Psycho slowly began to deteriorate as an artist following 1963's fondly remembered The Birds (and even that film was laborious in places). While many would put Family Plot or Topaz as the moment where they began to lose respect for the legendary director, it is actually the 1966 Paul Newman/Julie Andrews vehicle Torn Curtain that should take the prize for being Hitch's nadir. Slow, perfunctory, and really just duller than dirt, Torn Curtain blights the awesome star power of Newman and Andrews, turning them into unlikable and (even worse) uninteresting people. The story at the heart of the film is also listless, paced in such a lumbering fashion that it would make even the most ardent Hitchcock fans dig their nails into their legs and scream "when is this going to end?!" While Torn Curtain heralded the beginning of the end of Hitchcock's prolific career, the film is notable for one scene: the cottage fight between Newman's dour scientist and Wolfgang Kieling's security officer. Presented as the antithesis of a James Bond action scene, the fight in Torn Curtain is brilliant piece of work - vicious, savagely edited, and unbearably tense. It is the one redeeming quality of a film that is a dark stain on the Hitchcock's filmography.