Topaz (1969 movie)

Topaz, director Alfred Hitchcock's 51st movie, filmed between 1968 and 1969, was adapted from a book by Leon Uris. It is a Cold War and spy story with nearly 10 persons, none of them acting with a real heroic impulse.

It stars Frederick Stafford, Dany Robin, Claude Jade, Michel Subor, Karin Dor, John Vernon, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret, John Forsythe, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Per-Axel Arosenius.

The movie was not very successful or popular. Hitchcock changed the script shortly before the beginning of the filming and the distributor Universal forced a different ending to the one preferred by Hitchcock. For Topaz, Hitchcock engaged the 19-year-old French actress Claude Jade. She and Dany Robin, cast as her mother, would provide the glamour in the story. "Claude Jade is a rather quiet young lady," Hitchcock said later, "but I wouldn't guarantee [that] about her behavior in a taxi".

Three different conclusions were filmed. The first includes a duel between the French agent André Devereaux (Frederic Stafford) and his old friend but traitor Jacques Grandville (Michel Piccoli) in a soccer stadium while his wife (Dany Robin) and his worried daughter (Claude Jade) are waiting outside, the second shows the two men stepping into two different planes, one flying to Paris (with Devereaux) and the other flying to Moscow (with Grandville). The third – official – alternative includes the suicide of Grandville, rudely embedded into the flow of the story.

Image of Dany Robin, Frederick Stafford and Claude Jade:

There is also a 1945 documentary shot illegally in Japanese internment camps in the western United States during World War II called Topaz (1945 movie).