An undervalued and understudied film at best, Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) has gained its relatively small popular reputation largely on the basis of Paul Newman and Julie Andrews’s presence as (according to some dissatisfied reviewers, incompetent) star performers, and has attracted marginal scholarly attention as a ‘cold war’ story about American espionage, or pursuit, in Communist East Germany. Robin Wood, for example, sees it as a descent narrative, in which the hero, made vulnerable to dangers, sees “the need to commit himself completely to a woman” (200). Christopher Morris sees the film as an “allegory of the pursuit of the sign” (62). But film criticism and scholarship remain largely inoculated against serious considerations of dramaturgy and image construction, still fervently focused on the rather literary conceit of analyzing story content or language for its own sake-as metaphor, as mirror, or as evidence of an author’s obsession. The magnitude of Hitchcock’s genius has therefore been persistently overlooked, even by people who rave about him as a master. As William Rothman cannily suggests, “Part of what [Hitchcock] knew when he died is that America really never understood his films” (343).