Alfred Hitchcock hoped his 1969 Cold War film Topaz would be a sensational hit, but it didn’t happen, despite some promising elements.

In Topaz, pieces of a puzzle are added one by one without the audience knowing the exact significance of each piece until the complete picture is revealed at the end. It starts with the defection of a Russian intelligence officer to the American side, then the French government’s awareness of this defection without anyone knowing exactly how they found out. A French intelligence officer, Devereaux, based in Washington, is asked by the Americans to obtain photographs of a document in New York, an aide-memoire, signed between the Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba that will shed light on the relationship between the two countries.

Devereaux next travels to Cuba on behalf of the Americans to find evidence of Russian missiles (the year is 1962). In gratitude, the Americans offer Devereaux information from the Russian defector about Russian moles in the French intelligence service, thus coming back to the question of how the French government knew of the Russian defector in the first place.

These puzzle pieces are offered to the audience gradually, perhaps too gradually. Much time is spent on obtaining the photos of the aide-memoire at the Cuban delegation’s hotel in Harlem, Devereaux’s stint in Cuba, his wife’s suspicions he is having an affair with a Cuban woman, his actual affair with the Cuban woman who runs an anti-Castro underground network, and the collapse of that network. In other words, the movie is not tight and focused like a good thriller should be.

Devereaux, the protagonist, is played by the Czech actor Frederick Stafford, who, while certainly fine in the part, lacks the screen presence and charisma needed to hold this film together. Some sources suggest Sean Connery was under consideration for the part, and despite the incongruity of his playing a Frenchman, a strong, dynamic actor such as Connery was what this movie sorely needed to carry it.

Three supporting actors were excellent and more compelling than Stafford. John Vernon, playing a menacing Castro lieutenant, draws the audience to him in every scene he is in. Roscoe Lee Browne is superb as the Harlem operative who Devereaux employs to gain access to the Cuban delegation’s suites at a hotel in Harlem where he will be able to photograph the aide-memoire located in a locked briefcase in Vernon’s possession. Nominally the owner of a flower shop, Browne poses as a journalist seeking an interview with a member of the Cuban delegation, a man they know can be bribed in exchange for access to the aide-memoire. To get to this man, Browne must first pass Vernon’s scrutiny. Anticipating problems, Browne cleverly foregoes the suggestion of posing as a reporter from Playboy magazine and instead chooses Ebony, so that later, when he is confronted by the Vernon character’s reluctance to allow him access, he can play to the Communist revolutionary’s professed commitment to the marginalized and downtrodden by questioning out loud whether Vernon’s character refuses his entry because he is “anti-Negro,” thus guilting Vernon into letting him in. Finally, Philippe Noiret as one of the French intelligence officers working for the Russians brings to the role a superb combination of arrogance and panic.

Some things essential to the plot seem improbable. Devereaux is spotted by one of Vernon’s men in a crowd of hundreds if not thousands during a Castro-led mass rally in Havana. He is recognized as the man on the street in Harlem whom Roscoe Lee Browne accidentally stumbled upon while escaping from the Cubans at the Harlem hotel, and the jump is made that the stumble was in fact deliberate and therefore Devereaux must have been working with Roscoe Lee Browne, though they didn’t suspect any connection at the time. While all this is true (the stumble allowed Browne the opportunity to pass Devereaux the spy camera with the photographs in it), is a leap of logic that would only be made by characters in a movie with knowledge of the script not by real people.

In Cuba, an elderly couple working for the anti-Castro network is captured after taking important photographs of Russian missiles, thus putting the entire network in danger. Yet no one in the network wonders what became of them or even that they are unaccounted for. There seems to be no provision for this kind of eventuality even though their lives depend on it. Enough time passes for the couple to be tortured into revealing everything.

Finally, there is an elaborate scene in Cuba where one of the members of the underground network demonstrates to Devereaux how he has placed the covert film of the Russian missiles inside Devereaux’s razor blade containers so that he can smuggle the film out of Cuba undetected. But it turns out that film was not in the razor blades at all but in the binding of a blank memo book Devereaux’s mistress gave to him at the last minute, a discovery he makes by chance after he’s already out of Cuba. There is no explanation why Devereaux was kept in the dark about the true location of the film. It wasn’t as if he had no idea he was smuggling out film. In fact it was at his instigation that they took the photos in the first place. The entire circumstance makes no sense except as a pretext to provide a contrived twist when the Cubans discover the plot, search Devereaux’s razor blades at the airport and surprisingly find nothing.

The film was indifferently reviewed and earned $3,839,363 in North American by 1970. His next movie, filmed in England with a much smaller budget, did better although some people found it distasteful. That film is Frenzy.

Max Eastern is the author of the modern noir thriller The Gods Who Walk Among Us, a winner of the Kindle Scout competition.