Well, and now I'm interested in something I've been previously never interested in. 20 minutes well spent. Wonderful video.

It’ll take a little bit to get going, but your KZfaq channel will take off. You have so much potential and I’ll always come back to your vids!!

The opening scene with the defecting family, the daughter in the porcelain workshop and the final dash with the daughter falling over the bike is the best thing in the entire movie.

You have such a talent for analyzing films! Great insights! I'm glad I subscribed. Keep up the great work, really looking forward to what you'll do next!

I watched your snow white video and cried 👸and I thought ur channel would have like 400,000 subs...anyway keep on keepin on bc ur work is awesome. You will be successful on this platform 🖤

This is some next level insight, my friend. Thank you… I’ve always agreed about Topaz.

Just re-watched. EXCELLENT! A rare film that respects the intelligence of the viewer… Very refreshing.

100% here to boost this vid. You've really got a knack for making compelling video essays.

Thanks for this. I appreciated the analysis and truly enjoyed the film!

Fantastic! The first video I get after subscribing and I already have a movie I never considered putting on my watch list until today. Wonderful work here, thank you for sharing

You've convinced me.

Deverau is the maguffin?! Genius! NOW the movie finally makes sense. Thank you!

Dammit, Sir, you have most certainly convinced me. And made me feel like a bit of a fool for not noticing what is obviously obvious. Thank you. (According to the Wikipedia article about the film, Hitchcock like the escape ending, which I too prefer, as it is the more Hitchcockian ending.)

keep up the good work! I didn't realize how broad a mcguffin could be!

This is really interesting, great video!

Leaving comment to get you more views and bigger reach bc its excellent. Waiting on those Disney collections

Here for the algorithm. Good luck!

Wow, glad that this was recommended

What an excellent video. I'm so happy I stumbled upon this channel! And are you still gonna cover the Disney animated classics?

That spoiler warning was kind af. Thanks for lookin out guy 💪🏼

I like Topaz, it was not as bad as critics said. It does require repeated watchings.

With Topaz, I heard that Hitchcock and Screenwriter Samuel Taylor didn't get enough time to develop the script especially its emotional depth. For example, the film shows that Andre and Juanita truly loved each other. But it doesn't explore why Andre set aside his wife Nicole and fell in love with Juanita. I think Samuel Taylor liked the original ending (duel ending). I myself think that the duel ending is the best, because it does indicate that Andre wanted to die. After all, his lover Juanita de Cordoba is dead and Andre lost his ambition to live and his only concern is to solve the matter associated with Topaz since that is what Juanita died for.

Great summation, mate.

Hi, how are you? Wonderful editing, I am now interested in Topaz, you sold me! First

Hitchcock's most underated film A cold war psychological thriller Full of symbolism in both characters and colors

I want to see Topaz now!

The writer, Leon Uris, had a problem here as he was accused of plagiarism by the real French agent whom Devereaux was based on. He said that is was from an unpublished plot written by him. Anyway, according to the Los Angeles Times of the epoch, Uris paid the agent more than $300,000. It makes you wonder where Uris got the material for some of his other novels.

When.. did I even sub to this channel?

When I first viewed Topaz, I thought it was just an average Hitchcock film. Today I consider it a very good movie. I was very disappointed when I purchased the DVD to find that Universal used the British release ending with the traitor getting away and boarding a plane to the Soviet Union instead of him going back to his apartment and committing suicide. I was wondering what is considered the correct ending for Topaz? I always thought it was the suicide ending which I think is by far the best of the three endings filmed.

Subscribed for the Disney series, stayed for the general classic/obscure film analysis. In what is, I’m sure, a long list of films for analysis, I would love to see a video on your thoughts of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It’s one of my personal favorites, and, in my opinion, has several reasons to place it in cinematic and Disney history.

I watched Topaz half a year ago and actually liked it (probably because my expectations were so low). Then I forgot about it. However last week I began thinking about the film again and decided to rewatch it - and it was just as I remembered it. It has its lengths but all around an enjoyable watch. After that I found this analysis and wow - it makes some very good points. I think I will have to rewatch Topaz again some time in the near future. This was really a great analysis. Thank you. You really deserve a lot more subscribers.

Yeah, i always liked Topaz for all that reasons, and i'm glad i'm not alone anymore. Its a great film, with great shots, great sequences and good acting from solid and down to earth actors. For me its one of the few espionage movies that you actually can imagine happening in real life. North by Northwest has some very fanciful scenes, James Bond as well.

North by northwear feels like a remake to saboteur even to the part where they're visiting iconic usa hubs

They’re good videos, Brent!

The way the pov switches around makes me think of the visual novel Umineko. The cast starts out big and only gets bigger, and everybody seems to get a chance to give you a taste of what goes on in their head at least once, and it changes seamlessly between characters too. Very interesting, if a little bit jarring

Been reading all of Leon uris' books recently, started about a month ago and I'm about 8 deep. All of his books are real special but this one was really something else. Also a week and 3 books later and I still haven't gotten over that he couldn't think of a good ending and he just had to make it about himself and his book. I really loved this book but I feel like we were let down at the end. Almost as if he couldn't think of anything and had a deadline, and that instead of him having had the ending planned out from before he even started writing - as he has in his other books - he came to this finale in middle writing having thrown out his previous theory for an ending and thought of nothing else...

Could you answer me a random question? when mcguffin is a person we just need to know the least bit about him? if we know a lot about him, could he still be considered a mcguffin?

This documentary got me interested in this Hitchcock Classic. I like movies and TV Seires with espionage.

This is a helpful analysis. I think the "episodic" structure is precisely the problem. The different episodes don't build upon one another, so there is no tension or indeed suspense. I think Topaz would actually work (with minor changes) as a miniseries where the episodes don't need to build upon one another. Topaz would be a solid series with a weak final episode. Stafford's problem isn't that he isn't charismatic. Rather, it's that his acting is wooden. Your interpretation that he is the Macguffin though is really interesting. I think John Vernon as Rico Parra is a very strong presence. The cuts during the conversations are somewhat off. I can't quite put my finger on what is wrong exactly. The characters sometimes don't seem to be actually reacting to one another. There's often a split second lag.

Wow!! ❤

Slightly better than "Torn Curtain."

I've seen !

Great Insight, I always liked Topaz for the other characters and set-pieces it offered throughout the film, but I couldn't latch on to the protagonist who does take up a lot of time. Its a fantastic experiment, but I'm not convinced that a MacGuffin as a protagonist works. Absolutely worth trying, but ultimately a failed experiment in my opinion. However I do agree that all the other elements in the film were brilliant and deserve to be discussed.

'Masterpiece' is a struggle

I have enjoyed all the Hitchcock films I have seen, including the pre-USA creations, but I never saw "Topaz". Good thing! Without this analysis, I'm sure that I would never have "gotten it" and blamed Hitch, not my pedestrian film appreciation skills. .............. I think I also confused "Topaz" with "Reflections in a Golden Eye" because of the yellowiness of the film names. >_< In that film, in spite of Taylor and Brando, I had to bail after only 10 minutes as that unrelenting color made me queasy. .............. Your description of this film reminds me a bit of "Memento". That film has two separate, but simultaneous story lines, except that they go in opposite directions timewise. I identified with the film as we had a multi-handicapped legal guardinee with short-term memory problems like Guy Pierce's character. I recognized some of the behaviors and coping strategies. But I didn't truly understand the film until I saw the chart on its Wikipedia page. ............... "Topaz" and "Memento" are two challenging films. I love challenging, I love quirky, and like Mr Fudd, I like nice. But not necessarily at the same time.

I've seen it. It's not a masterpiece, but it's a piece of something which I won't mention.

❤️

great movie...

Are you planning on making more Disney videos.

It's been a long time since I've seen this film. I thought it was one of Hitchcock's most relevant movies. Maybe it's because of what we know now about how terrorists cells work. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Maybe the only thing wrong with it is it truly was ahead of its time. If you took away the Cuban Missile Crisis and had it be about a different issue it still works. Also maybe people lived through the crisis and know why it happened and how it ended. But maybe the worst part about it is the ending. You have to really care about the spy network not being a threat any longer. They can't live to cause havoc another day. Maybe the ending was its downfall. It's much better to anger the audience then it is to just not have them care. It needed an ending like All The President's Men. It's funny right before you showed a clip from Argo, I was thinking about it. Actually All The President's Men would be a good movie for you to dig into.

I liked this film.

Deverau was covert, performing under cover work. Not to be noticed, not obvious. Maybe that’s another way to say covert work is akin to mcguffin

1:13 The Birds is perfect. WTF are you talking about.

Glad Snow White is still most popular video.

To me, Topaz was simply the worst thing a film can be: boring. Along with Lifeboat, The Lodger, and To Catch a Thief, its a Hitchcock film that I will not be rewatching. Out of the 6 films Hitchcock directed after Psycho, I think the three "best" are The Birds, Torn Curtain, and Frenzy.

All that’s true.. but the film still doesn’t have an emotional centre. An episodic film shouldn’t be this disjointed.. a good episodic film would connect the episodes through with similar forms amd parallel characters and motifs.

Sorry...nice try, but the movie is dull, indifferently acted, and overlong. (And I'm a Hitchcock fan!) TORN CURTAIN also a disappointment.