YMMV / Topaz

• Designated Hero: Mostly because he's played by a weak actor (Frederick Stafford who appeared in many European B-Films) but even otherwise, the film's "hero" is an adulterous and duplicitious Manipulative Bastard who is so incompetent that he endangers his allies and his family.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Roscoe Lee Browne's character and the entire Harlem segment is highly regarded, for its suspense and the set design. Especially interesting in that Dubois is one of just two prominent black characters in Hitchcock's films (Joe in Lifeboat is the other one).
  • John Vernon's Cuban officer is considered a sympathetic Tragic Villain in the vein of Claude Rains in Notorious.
  • Michel Subor as François (Devereaux's son-in-law) recovers from What Happened to the Mouse? syndrome and returns for some strong moments late in the film, including delivering the script's best line.
    "I've been shot—just a little."
• Evil Is Cool: As usual in Hitchcock, the villains are pretty cool especially when played by the likes of Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and John Vernon.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The "airport" ending shows Devereaux getting on a plane. Frederick Stafford ended up dying in a 1979 midair collision.
• One-Scene Wonder: Roscoe Lee Browne as Andre's New York contact who steals the missile plans.
• Poor Man's Substitute: Frederick Stafford is pretty clearly emulating Sean Connery, who was Hitchcock's first choice to play Devereaux. Stafford was in fact one of the many actors who played the title character in the OSS 117 films, which was one of the many followers of the Connery-era James Bond films.
• Signature Scene: The Harlem sequence and Juanita's death (especially the overhead shot) are the scenes that are considered its big "Hitchcock" moments.
• So Okay, It's Average: Despite its reputation as arguably Alfred Hitchcock's worst film, it's not actually particularly bad in and of itself, it just doesn't live up to the rest of Hitchcock's impressive filmography.
• Special Effects Failure: Two really poorly-done Chroma Key shots late in the film—the Driving a Desk scene in a convertible, and Nordstrom meeting Devereaux on an airport tarmac.
• Spiritual Successor: After not being happy with Torn Curtain, Hitchcock decided to make another attempt at a film that had the same scope as a James Bond movie but was more realistic and serious in depicting how spying actually works. Like Torn Curtain, Topaz starts out with a character defecting to the other side of the Cold War in Copenhagen (there it was an American going to East Germany, here it's a Soviet going to America).

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