With Torn Curtain, Julie Andrews stepped away from musicals and into a Hitchcock thriller set in a divided Cold War Europe.
Torn Curtain was released in 1966 and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Paul Newman played Michael Armstrong, an American physicist who appears to defect to East Germany, and Julie Andrews played Sarah Sherman, his assistant and fiancee, who follows him without knowing his true purpose. The film was set at a time when the division of Germany was a daily reality, and its tension came from suspicion, surveillance and the difficulty of trusting what one was told.
Andrews’s role was deliberately unshowy. Sarah Sherman is intelligent and loyal, but she is also kept in the dark, and much of the performance lies in watching her try to understand a man who seems to have betrayed everything they believed in. The film’s most famous sequence, a slow and difficult murder in a farmhouse, showed Hitchcock’s interest in how violence actually feels, rather than how it looks in a conventional thriller.
Torn Curtain was not one of Hitchcock’s most popular films, and its production was marked by disagreements, but it remains interesting as a portrait of Andrews at a turning point. She was no longer only the star of musicals; she was an actress willing to work in a darker register, in a film that asked its audience to sit with uncertainty. In that sense, Torn Curtain belongs in any serious account of her screen career, even if it is less often revived than Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music.