Torn Curtain is a 1966 American spy political thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews.

Written by Brian Moore, the film is set in the Cold War and concerns an American scientist who appears to defect behind the Iron Curtain to East Germany.

Armstrong visits a contact, a "farmer", where it is revealed that his defection is in fact a ruse to gain the confidence of the East German scientific establishment, in order to learn how much their chief scientist Gustav Lindt and by extension, the Soviet Union, knows about anti-missile systems.

Visiting the physics faculty of Karl Marx University in Leipzig the next day, Armstrong's interview with the scientists ends abruptly when he is questioned by security officials about the missing Gromek.

The faculty try to interrogate Sherman about her knowledge of the American "Gamma Five" anti-missile program, but she refuses to cooperate and runs from the room, even though she has agreed to defect to East Germany.

Roadblocks, highway robbery by Soviet Army deserters, and bunching with the "real" bus result in the police becoming aware of the deception, and everyone aboard is forced to flee.

While attending the ballet and waiting to be picked up, they are spotted and reported to the police by the lead ballerina, who flew to East Berlin on the same airplane as Armstrong.

The ballerina, desperate to reveal the fugitives' hiding place, identifies the hampers, which are shot up by a guard with a machine gun while dangling over the pier, but Armstrong and Sherman have already escaped by jumping overboard and swimming to the Swedish dock.

To find a gripping plot, Hitchcock turned towards the spy thriller genre, which was greatly in fashion since the early 1960s with the success of the James Bond series starting in 1962 with Dr.

[3] With these facts as a starting point Hitchcock created a plot line involving an American nuclear physicist, Professor Michael Armstrong, defecting to East Germany.

The twist of the story is that Professor Armstrong is in fact a member of a secret spy ring and he has defected only with the idea of stealing a formula from an East German scientist.

[4] In autumn 1964, Hitchcock offered to let Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita, who had successfully helped adapt his own novel to a well-regarded film directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, write the script.

His five-page synopsis, completed on 26 March 1965, already contained two key scenes of the film: Torn Curtain's opening aboard a cruise steamer in the Norwegian fjords, and the brutal killing of undercover agent Gromek by the American scientist and a farm woman.

[9] Brian Moore's own dissatisfaction with the project was reflected in his novel Fergus (1970), which features Bernard Boweri, an unsympathetic character based on Hitchcock.

[14] At the time, Julie Andrews was Hollywood's biggest star after the back-to-back successes of her films Mary Poppins (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965).

Hitchcock surrounded Newman and Andrews with colorful supporting actors: Lila Kedrova, fresh from winning an Academy Award for Zorba the Greek, as the eccentric and flamboyantly dressed Countess Kuczynska who helps Armstrong and Sherman in their escape in return for their sponsoring her to go to America; Tamara Toumanova as the haughty prima ballerina whose limelight Armstrong steals when he arrives in East Berlin; Ludwig Donath as the crotchety professor Lindt, eager to cut the chat and get down to business; and Wolfgang Kieling as the sinister Hermann Gromek, the gum-chewing personal guide the East German authorities provide to shadow Armstrong's every move.

Hitchcock initially wanted to shoot the film entirely on location in the Eastern Bloc but could not because he refused to give East German officials a copy of his screen play.

[7] Lila Kedrova was Hitchcock's favorite among the cast; he ate lunch with her several times during filming and invited her home for dinners with his wife.

Steven Spielberg told James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio that as a young man he sneaked onto the soundstage to observe the filming, and remained for 45 minutes before an assistant producer asked him to leave.

As a result, after the film was released he defected to East Germany in real life, calling the United States "the most dangerous enemy of humanity in the world today" and guilty of "crimes against the Negro and the people of Vietnam.

In the climactic scene involving the ballet at the East Berlin theatre, the music was excerpted from Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film "a pathetically undistinguished spy picture, and the obvious reason is that the script is a collection of what Mr. Hitchcock most eschews—clichés.

[24] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Up until about the point at which the plot makes itself clear, Torn Curtain is as good as anything Hitchcock has ever done in his other forty-nine (or is it fifty-one?)

The let-down comes with the verdant studio hillock that was surely never meant to fool anyone, and after this the film drops like a stone, without impetus, without imagination, without interest.

"[25] Richard Schickel, writing in Life, concluded: "Hitchcock is tired to the point where what once seemed highly personal style is now repetitions of past triumphs.

"[24] Writing in Punch, Richard Mallet asserted: "The film as a whole may be a bit diffuse... but it has some brilliant scenes, it's pleasing to the eye, and it is continuously entertaining.