In the mid-1960s, Alfred Hitchcock made a pair of thrillers dealing with Cold War European espionage. TORN CURTAIN, inspired by the defection of Guy Burgess and Don Maclean from Britain to Russia in the 1950s, starred Paul Newman as an American scientist who stages a false defection to the East. Julie Andrews played his alarmed fiancé/assistant, who follows him. Hitchcock was reportedly unsatisfied with his relationship to Method actor Newman, and for his next film, TOPAZ, he worked with mostly European actors to adapt Leon Uris’s novel. Uris’s tale was based on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sapphire Affair, in which President John F. Kennedy passed on to French President Charles de Gaulle suspicions that Russian agents had infiltrated French intelligence. In Uris’s novel and Hitchcock’s film, French agent Andre Devereaux (played in the film by Frederick Stafford) travels to New York and Cuba on the hunt for the missiles, eventually also uncovering “Topaz,” a Soviet ring operating in Paris. While hailed for its style and imaginative set pieces, TOPAZ isn’t considered by most critics one of Hitchcock’s best. Vincent Canby of the New York Times, however, found its low-key qualities perfectly suited to its subject matter: “TOPAZ is not a conventional Hitchcock film,” he wrote. “It's rather too leisurely and the machinations of plot rather too convoluted to be easily summed up in anything except a very loose sentence. Being pressed, I'd say that it's about espionage as a kind of game, set in Washington, Havana, and Paris at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, involving a number of dedicated people in acts of courage, sacrifice, and death, after which the survivors find themselves pretty much where they were when they started, except that they are older, tired, and a little less capable of being happy.”