Topaz (1969 Film) - Alternate Endings

Alternate Endings

In the original ending, there was a duel between André and Jacques in a French football stadium, shot by associate producer Herbert Coleman when Hitchcock had to return to the U.S. for a family emergency. This ending was panned by audiences during test screenings.

Under pressure from the studio, Hitchcock shot an ending he actually liked better, with Jacques escaping on an Aeroflot flight to the Soviet Union just at the same time as André and Nicole are boarding their Pan Am flight to the States. But this ending apparently confused audiences.

So, as a compromise, Hitchcock used existing footage to create a new ending: Granville is exposed and expelled from a NATO meeting, and commits suicide behind his drawn curtains (since no footage of his doing so existed).

Eventually, the studio decided to release different endings in different countries: the suicide in the U.S. and France, the airport ending in Britain.

When American Movie Classics aired the film in the 1990s, it included alternative endings filmed by Hitchcock that had been kept in the Universal vaults. The "Masterpiece Collection" DVD released by Universal restores a number of deleted scenes and uses the ending in which Jacques escapes. All three endings appear as extras on the DVD, together with an "Appreciation" by Leonard Maltin in which Maltin discusses the deleted scenes and alternate endings among other things.