Critic's Grade: C-

This movie is so flat,stiff,staged,plastic,phony that one is forced to reevaluate all of Hitchcock.Once you start thinking about it,Vertigo and The Birds have acting that is almost as bad as Topaz.
There is actual newsreel footage of Fidel Castro together with an actor playing Fidel who is 20 years older wearing a fake beard that is not even in place.We were not going to notice the difference?
In one scene Fidel is in a Harlem Hotel carrying a briefcase full of documents outlining the Castro-Communist Master Plan to destroy America which the CIA thinks it can grab by making a cold approach to a member of the Cuban entourage.
The owner of a local flower shop calmly offers this Cuban a few bucks to steal the documents from under Fidel's nose.The plan goes bad,a mob chases after the CIA spy but he still manages to give them the slip,even though they were 3 feet hehind him!
In Cuba a single woman is living alone in a mansion out of Gone With the Wind.In real life the place would have been turned into a museum or hospital.Nobody,at any time after 1959 lived that lavishly in Cuba.
The movie is based on a book by Leon Uris which in turn was based on the memoirs of a French intelligence agent Uris ran into in Acapulco.
His story was that a recent high level KGB defector had come to the US with specific information of a KBG spy ring in France called Sapphire-(renamed Topaz in the book).In fact the KGB agent had defected 10 years previously,gave up all solid info within months,and fabricated whatever his minders wanted to hear thereafter.
This movie was made by Universal Studios which at the time was run by 2 Jewish Mobsters notorious for robbing everyone.Hitchock conned his way into becoming their personal advisor on the black arts.THey would have to admire KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn who conned his way into becoming THE expert on the KBG by simply claiming that all other defectors were double agents spreading disinformation.Golitsyn formed a symbiotic relationship with CIA spy chief James Angleton,in which Golitsyn funished the details to reinforce Angleton's paranoid delusions-with Angleton giving Golitsyn millions in cash and access to secret CIA files.
Angleton and Golitsyn take their show on the road to Paris where they tell DEGaulle that Resistance fighters he has worked with all his life are KGB agents.DEGaulle throws them and the US and NATO out!
One French agent goes along with the Angleton-Topaz story,defects to the US,and runs off to Acapulco where he meets Leon Uris.

All Reviews by Fred Landis
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