North by Northwest
Spy Thriller | 136 Minutes | 1959 | United States
(4/4)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock | Producer: Alfred Hitchcock | Writer: Ernest Lehman | Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau, Leo G. Carroll, Jessie Royce Landis | Music: Bernard Herrmann | Cinematographer: Robert Burks | Editor: George Tomasini
A Madison Avenue advertising man, run-of-the-mill if unusually tanned with his grey flannel suit an impeccable fit, stands up at the wrong moment in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) has theatre tickets. He wishes to send a wire to his mother, but by summoning the wrong waiter and ostensibly responding to the wrong call, he gets mistaken for George Kaplan, a government agent hitherto kept well under wraps.
As Kaplan, Thornhill is bundled into the back of a car at gunpoint and driven to the estate of a Lester Townsend, which has been turned into a front for the foreign spy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason). A few train journeys and crop dusters later, and Roger Thornhill will have swapped the close confines of the Oak Room and advertising lunches for the windswept precipice of Mount Rushmore, and a life-or-death escape from Vandamm’s goons.
At the Townsend estate, Thornhill is plied with bourbon, and as he makes a fortuitous getaway he is arrested for driving drunk. When he visits the United Nations building and meets the real Lester Townsend, he winds up clutching the knife which has just been plunged by one of Vandamm’s henchmen into the unsuspecting diplomat’s back. On the front page of every newspaper as the presumed murderer, Thornhill takes the 20th Century Limited to Chicago in search of George Kaplan. Without a berth of his own, he bunks with Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), a dazzling blonde who is still more than meets the eye.
Every decision Roger Thornhill makes seems to serve a dual function and tend in opposite directions. With raised hands and open palms he makes a halting gesture, while stepping smoothly and determinedly through the mire. Heady passion in the swirling arms of a train cabin gives way to waiting games out by a rural bus stop, as restraint and release vie with escape and entanglement. At the same time his path carries one ineluctable destination, charting a scenic and circumambulatory course north by northwest.
In North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock arrives at the climax of a certain type of filmmaking and achieves the fullest realisation of one of his most particular themes. In bold strokes, the psychological aspect of a man wrongly accused flourishes as a thrilling escapade of romance. North by Northwest depicts the nightmare of the movies turned into a dream: a crisis of identity as a man is dragged kicking and screaming into a world not of his own making, the lure of beauty which lingers like a mirage out of reach, yet in this instance the hero manages to regain his footing, and the journey is ennobling, and the woman made flesh.
North by Northwest retains the interiority and the fraught romantic interplay which characterised earlier films like Rear Window and Vertigo. Roger Thornhill is unrealised as the man from Madison Avenue, although all of his successes are aided by a carefully cultivated, debonair charm. When he is still chafing somewhere between his mundane existence and his forced identity as Kaplan, he tries on one of Kaplan’s suits and says, ‘Obviously they’ve mistaken me for a much shorter man’.
For Eve Kendall, Thornhill becomes the locus of all her frustrations, personal and professional, from failed relationships to her precarious position as Vandamm’s mistress in spite of her apparent mastery of the art of statecraft. When she describes her introduction into the world of government espionage, she explains ‘Maybe it was the first time anyone ever asked me to do anything worthwhile’ and all of the play and innuendo stops for a moment. With a new depth of understanding, Thornhill responds ‘Has life been like that?’
Cary Grant had played high-spirited, voluptuous, and romantic but by now everything was falling in just the right place. His comedy is droll and unobtrusive, as when he complains of being forced to drink a whole bottle of bourbon without a chaser, or in the wonderful hotel sequence with Jessie Royce Landis as his mother, touches Kaplan’s comb slick with a dandruff treatment and shows disdain through his fingertips.
Anecdotally Grant used his own tailor for the film’s iconic grey suit, while Hitchcock took Eva Marie Saint to Bergdorf Goodman after rejecting the wardrobe approved by studio bosses at MGM. The simple three-roll-two with matching grey tie remains the defining image of Grant, while Saint proved her mettle as a leading lady on the back of dowdier pictures, hard-nosed and captivating as Eve Kendall with ripples of warmth.
Credit for the script goes to the first-time Hitchcock collaborator Ernest Lehman, whose dialogue bristles with an offhand directness without losing any of its wit or charm. The matte paintings used for the Vandamm house atop Mount Rushmore or for some shots of the mountain itself rank among the best on film.
Hitchcock relishes the opportunity to play with perspective, showing Thornhill as a speck on the run from the United Nations building, or scrabbling to hold on to the side of the mountain as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln gaze on. One of the speculative titles for North by Northwest, itself a sort of MacGuffin, was ‘The Man in Lincoln’s Nose’, with the hero to be given away by a sneeze.
From the first frame of the title sequence, designed by Saul Bass with a rollicking score by Bernard Herrmann, to the final flourish of a train as it roars through a tunnel as Thornhill and Eve consummate marital bliss, North by Northwest is a model of refinement while being packed to the brim with thrills and spills. It is Hitchcock’s purest expression of action. Cinema by any other name looks and sounds like North by Northwest.
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