Topaz is a 1969 American espionage thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Frederick Stafford, Dany Robin, Karin Dor, John Vernon, Claude Jade, Michel Subor, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and John Forsythe.

Based on the 1967 novel of the same title by Leon Uris, the film is about a French intelligence agent (Stafford) who becomes entangled in Cold War politics before the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and then the breakup of an international Soviet spy ring.

The story is loosely based on the 1962 Sapphire Affair,[3] which involved the head of France's SDECE in the United States, the spy Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, a friend of Uris,[3] who played an important role in "helping the U.S. discover the presence of Russian offensive missiles in Cuba.

During debriefing, CIA agent Mike Nordstrom learns that Soviet missiles with nuclear warheads will be placed in Cuba.

In New York City, French agent Philippe Dubois is to contact Uribe, who is the secretary to Cuban official Rico Parra, who is staying at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem to show solidarity with the black community.

Chased and shot at by Cuban revolutionaries, Dubois purposefully knocks into Devereaux, who is watching events from the other side of the street, and slips him the camera.

His mistress, Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor), was the widow of a "hero of the Revolution," which enables her to work undercover in the resistance.

During a mass rally and a lengthy speech by the líder máximo, the red-headed Cuban guard recognises Devereaux's face from the New York City incident.

André invites some of his old friends and colleagues, including Granville and Jarré, to a lunch at a fine Paris restaurant under the pretext of helping Devereaux prepare for his inquiry.

François returns to Michèle's apartment and says he was clubbed and kidnapped, but managed to escape from his captors' car, after overhearing the phone number of their boss, known as Columbine, the head of Topaz.

Shel Talmy and William Piggott Brown first tried to option the film rights to Leon Uris's novel for $500,000 in 1967, but the deal was halted by the Bank of England because of the 1967 devaluation of the pound sterling.

Afterwards Philippe de Vosjoli filed a lawsuit against Uris, Universal Pictures, and MCA Inc claiming that they had stolen the plot for the novel and film from his unpublished manuscript Le reseau Topaz.

Hitchcock attempted to hire Arthur Laurents to complete the work on the screenplay, but he refused, leaving an unfinished draft while the shooting schedule was rapidly approaching.

[4] Portions of Topaz were filmed on location in Copenhagen; Wiesbaden, West Germany; Virginia, Paris, New York City, and Washington, DC.

It was shot by associate producer Herbert Coleman when Hitchcock had to return to the United States for a family emergency.

Also, screenwriter Samuel Taylor objected to the villain escaping unpunished, and there were fears that the ending would offend the French government.

[9] As a compromise, Hitchcock used existing footage to create a third ending in which Granville is exposed and expelled from a NATO meeting.

The extended cut adds a sequence after Devereaux returns to Paris, in which he is picked up at the airport by his daughter Michèle and his son-in-law François.

[13] Vincent Canby of The New York Times placed the film on his year-end list of the ten best films of 1969 and declared it a "huge success, a quirky, episodic espionage tale made rich and suspenseful, not through conventional Hitchcockian narrative drive, but through odd, perverse Hitchcockian detail, economy of cinematic gesture, and an over-all point of view that can never for a moment be mistaken as belonging to anyone but Hitchcock.

"[14] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times also liked the film and wrote that although there was a "loss of momentum" at the climax because of the time taken to resolve the complex plot, the first three quarters of the film were "bravura displays of the fabled Hitchcock technique, replete with dazzling camera movements and acute imagery."

It is just that the picture seems to move predictably and lacks the fun and surprise blood curdling moments that can lift his thrillers with breathtaking excitement.

"[16] The Monthly Film Bulletin in Britain wrote that the film had "intermittent pleasures (the silent conversation behind hotel doors seen from across the street, the long pull back across the conference room and the reverse track forward ending with a zoom on to Piccoli's face), yet we are constantly deprived of the action set pieces which would have given the narrative its much needed boost.

"[18] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker called it "the same damned spy picture he's been making since the thirties, and it's getting longer, slower, and duller.