Here are a pair of posters for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1966 thriller Torn Curtain.

Like several of Hitch’s later movies, Torn Curtain is rather uneven, old-fashioned and boring in places. I saw it years again on TV and have not revisited it since.

Stars Paul Newman and Julie Andrews try hard, but don’t have much chemistry together and the dialogue lacks the sparkle of many of the great director’s earlier efforts, especially those featuring couples in peril (The Man Who Knew Too Much etc etc).

The movie is set in the cold war, mostly in East Germany. It is mainly remembered for an extended scene where Newman and a woman struggle to kill a foreign security agent in a remote farmhouse. Hitchcock’s stated interest was to show how difficult it was to kill a man, because a number of spy thrillers at the time (I presume he meant James Bond), made killing look easy.  After failing to deliver the coup de grace via bludgeoning and stabbing, they eventually drag him to the oven and succeed in gassing him to death!

Here is an impressive French grande poster and a much smaller slightly battered Belgian version. I am a huge Hitchcock fan and have a number of posters for his movies framed in my office, but as I do not love this particular movie I am selling both these posters here.