Torn Curtain

Torn Curtain was Alfred Hitchcock's attempt at a "serious Bond film": i.e. Bond, without the parody element. His ideas were to have a gray color scheme, get rid of the humor, the girls, and especially show how difficult it is to actually kill a person.
With this in mind, yes, the film is as dark and unappealing as you may think. At the time, though, it seemed like the thing to do since the Bond series had basically copied many elements that Hitchcock himself had used in previous films, the most obvious example being North by Northwest. The master, after a box office failure with Marnie, and with the pressure of it being his 50th film, wanted desperately to show that he could send a new trend, change styles and keep up with the times, a desire which led him to several other unfortunate decisions.

Besides that, several major problems plagued the film: Universal wanted famous stars to recapture some of the glamor of Hitchcock's fifties movies. The director wasn't necessarily against the idea but the two leads chosen were bad casting. Julie Andrews didn't inspire Hitchcock and missed the so needed above-mentioned glamor. Although they both were respectful with one another, he considered her unattractive. A memo about a line to his scriptwriters politely reveals his feelings about her looks: "Not that I wish to cast any aspersions on Miss Andrews' physiognomy, but do you think 'beautiful' is perhaps too much, and cannot we say 'lovely' instead?"

Paul Newman was fine in the looks department, but he was a method actor, and Mr. Hitchcock was not the kind of director who would trouble himself with character motivation for a 5 second shot where one character hands a note to another. Hence they did not get along.
As if that was not enough, the actor's salary skyrocketed, which Hitchcock always resented, and chances of going on location in Europe were lost.

Some character actors were enjoyable, such as Lila Kedrova, Tamara Toumanova, and of course Wolfgang Kieling as Gromek, none of which could quite save the picture, which was a box office disaster.

So what's left? The idea of the kill which bloomed into an iconic murder scene. And a movie-that-could-have-been. How so? Well for one thing, an interesting idea which was shot, edited and scored was dropped because it would have made the lead characters even more unsympathetic.

Scenes 123 to 135 were to follow the murder scene: Newman and Andrews were invited to see a factory were they met Gromek's older brother (played by the same actor). This was in keeping with the realistic approach of the horror of killing a human being: in this scene, we learn that Gromek was a kind family man with three kids waiting for him at home. The brother then cuts a piece of sausage with a knife similar to the one used for the murder of his brother and asks Newman's character to give it to Gromek. Eventually, this scene was cut. You can find the script for the complete sequence on Steven DeRosa's website.

The most famous element of the film that did not make the final cut, obviously, is the Bernard Herrmann score.
Hitchcock usually liked to work with a team of people who came back film after film. The desire to change styles, his relatively recent move from Paramount to Universal, and the deaths of some of his co-workers put and end to that.


Bernard Herrmann had scored his most famous films and it was implicit that he would score the new film. Alfred Hitchcock sent him a telegram requesting a "pop score". In itself, the request basically meant that he wanted another composer: no way anyone in their right mind would think that Herrmann would compose a pop tune, although some of the films he worked on had a pop song connected to them, some composed from his themes (Marnie).

Eventually, Herrmann's score was as dark as expected (and as the film itself) and the two men argued over it. The composer walked out and Hitchcock commissioned John Addison a new score. You probably know the theme he later composed for Murder She Wrote. The pop theme "Green years" composed for the film was also cut from it and appears only on the soundtrack album.
Some cues of the original score were recorded by Herrmann and used in the special features section of the DVD. Others weren't recorded (or weren't used in it). But the Herrmann music was also recorded later (never in its entirety) by Elmer Bernstein and Joel McNeely.

Although the famous murder scene finally went unscored in the final cut, initially Hitchcock requested music in this scene and both composers wrote a cue for it.
Here is the scene with Herrmann's music:

Here is John Addison's take at the scene:

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That's all for today, folks!