In a Haphazard Direction: ‘North by Northwest’ (1959)
In Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock certainly found the right man to be his Wrong Man. Grant wasn’t Hitch’s first Wrong Man, by any means, but he was his most debonair, his most whimsical, and, for all that, his most enigmatic. Hitch and Ernest Lehman knew going into the writing of North by Northwest that they wanted their guy to be an innocent man on the run, and that they wanted to plug in certain bizarre locales and scenarios. The rest they’d figure out on the way.
That sense of impromptu fun is evident in the movie’s spirit, and also in its incoherence. Very few seem bothered by the latter. North by Northwest stands alone among Hitchcock’s work as the sort of pure-popcorn picaresque romp that would soon become popular in the form of the James Bond pictures and then, shortly after, the Indiana Jones saga.
And yet, there is psychological subtext, if you care to look for it. Roger Thornhill is a Madison Avenue ad man unenriched by authentic self-identity. He’s way too close to his mother; knows her schedule down to the bridge game. He’s consumed by his soulless work. His initials — his “trademark” — are on his matchbook covers, and they read “ROT”: Roger O. Thornhill. The O, we’re told, stands for nothing, perhaps like the man himself, but what does ROT itself stand for? Does it stand for the rot of his unused soul?
Roger will soon have a chance to find out exactly what his soul consists of, when he’s mistaken by a couple of underworld goons for one George Kaplan, abducted, and set upon a misadventure that will take him not only all over the map of the United States but a good part of the human experience, as he tries to flee and hide from his would-be captors. That’s a long story, and we’ll be able to get to some of it, but suffice to say for now that the plot is self-consciously ludicrous, in both its plausibility and its comprehensibility. Grant himself complained to the director that he didn’t know exactly what was going on, but Hitchcock wanted it that way — wanted his leading man to be as bewildered as the character he was playing.
Grant biographer Marc Eliot finds more going in with this character than is indicated by the script, believing as he does that “the real ‘chase’ of the film [is] the repressed Thornhill’s desire to invade and inhabit the adventurous, brave, physical, clever, aggressive, and finally romantic world of the idealized (and mythic) George Kaplan, the man Thornhill secretly (subconsciously) wishes he could be.”
When you put it like that, it starts to make some sense. Then you can easily take it just a step and a half further, and what you get is this:
Even as Hitchcock’s cameras were rolling for North by Northwest, Grant’s secret, ongoing LSD sessions had allowed him to turn his own pursuit inward, to make the vital connections between the persona of “Cary Grant” and the private Cary Grant. In that sense, the film celebrates as much as it reflects the success of that union and turns Hitchcock’s orchestrated Thornhill-to-Kaplan into the most personal, revealing, moving, and ultimately profound screen performance of Grant’s long and brilliant movie career.
There’d be no North by Northwest without Ernest Lehman, which is another way of saying there’d be no North by Northwest without Bernard Herrmann. As Hitch’s longtime composer, it had been Herrmann who suggested he meet with Lehman and think about doing a project with him. Originally, they worked on the script of a film to be called The Wreck of the Mary Deare.
They both lost interest, and without even telling the studio, they dropped the script and began to fiddle around with this other idea, which would incorporate elements that had long fascinated Hitchcock. He remembered how at a party a journalist had told him the CIA once used a nonexistent agent, a decoy, to confuse the enemy while their real agents went to work. Hitch liked the idea of having an unsuspecting man mistaken for this agent-that-doesn’t-exist, then following him through all the havoc this causes in his life.
Hitchcock had always liked setting his action amidst iconic locales: the Statue of Liberty, the Royal Albert Hall, historic San Francisco….He’d long wanted to stage a chase atop Mount Rushmore, and here, he figured, is where he could take the opportunity to do so. Before that, however, our hero alights on such settings as the UN Plaza, Grand Central Station, the 20th Century Limited train, a Frank Lloyd Wright-like den of mischief, the Ambassador East hotel, and the barren American Midwest.
That last location would come in handy for staging the chase across Mount Rushmore, but it left unresolved the issue of who’s chasing who, and why, and how did they get up there, and what are they doing in South Dakota in the first place. “Since I never knew where I was going next,” Lehman has said of the writing process for Northwest, “I was constantly painting myself into corners, and then trying to figure out a way out of them. As a result, the picture has about ten acts instead of three, and if I’d tried to sit down at the beginning and conceive the whole plot, I could have never done it. Everything was written in increments….So, in the end, the audience never knows what’s coming next, because I didn’t either.”
Lehman had determined from the outset to make “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures,” by which me meant “something that was witty and entertaining, with lots of suspense, and all kinds of colorful locales — things like that. Everything that I’d enjoyed from Hitchcock pictures in the past.”
He’d set out to write the quintessential Hitchcock picture, and in succeeding he’d written a Hitchcock picture unlike any other.
In Saul Bass’s opening-title sequence, the white-on-green grid displaying the credits ingeniously dissolves into a Manhattan office building similarly patterned. Meanwhile, the Bernard Herrmann score sets the mood. Down on the street, a fat man runs after a bus but the door shuts before he can reach it. Bass titles; Herrmann music; Hitch cameo. We’re definitely in Hitchcockland. But there’s something different this time, something slightly off, perhaps in the music, which signals a more visceral kind of action than usual. Herrmann himself unimprovably described itas “a kaleidoscopic orchestral fandango designed to kick off the exciting rout which follows.”
After a brief but busy taxi ride with his secretary that establishes the hectic, harried, hustling quality of his life, we see Thornhill strolling through the lobby of the Plaza Hotel as if he very much belongs there. This makes sense: Grant at the time lived at the Plaza; he made this stroll every day.
In the bar he sits at a table with some gentlemen. It’s business. He signals to the waiter for help with a telegram, but does so at an inopportune time, for one of the waiters is calling the name of George Kaplan. Two goons who’ve been watching believe this is Thornhill acknowledging his status as George Kaplan. They manage to surreptitiously hustle him out of the hotel under threat of violence. Six minutes into a 136-minute movie, the adventure has begun.
Thornhill is taken to a secluded estate in the country, where he is locked in the library and visited by a villainous presence by the name of Phillip Vandamm, who casts himself in ominously shaded lamplight and, in a sinister English accent, says deviously droll things like “Games? Must we?” and “The least I can do is afford you the opportunity of surviving the evening.”
They’re joined by Vandamm’s “secretary,” Leonard, who immediately telegraphs homosexuality by observing of Thornhill, “He’s a well-tailored one, isn’t he?” (This characterization was intentional on the part of Hitchcock, who liked to have fun with the censors.)
After a series of events that make up for in whimsy and suspense what they lack in plausibility, Thornhill finds himself aboard the 20th Century Limited, due west across the United States. He is not only on the run but on the hunt, to find the real George Kaplan and put this matter to rest once and for all. His attempt to retrace Kaplan’s supposed footsteps is what sends our journey across the map.
On the train there is a woman, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), with whom Kaplan engages in some steamy banter in the dining car. When she tells Thornhill that she never discusses love on an empty stomach, we can see her lips utter something slightly different: “I never make love on an empty stomach.” The censored line is much better — more tantalizing for being only suggestive
They end up in Eve’s sleeper car, where she hides him from the police. (Roger has been framed for a fatal stabbing.) Soon enough, however, we learn that her motive for doing so was to keep him free for Vandamm and his men, with whom she is in cahoots. But is it her only motive? Suddenly our story has a Love Interest.
Although the first James Bond movie wouldn’t be made for another few years, the novels had been pouring out of Ian Fleming since 1953; by the time of Northwest’s release, there were seven of them on the market. For his part, Lehman claims no influence in either direction. Many commentators have pointed out the similarities: dashing gentleman making his way through scenic locales while foiling sinister foes with British accents, all while cracking wise with his quips and seducing sexy women who just may, some of them, be villains themselves.
I know of Lehman acknowledging the similarities only once, when on the DVD commentary track he holds the Bond movies responsible for Northwest’s belated elevation to Classic status, for the way the Bond franchise “tended to diminish the excitement” of his own movie, whereupon Northwest “became, in a sense, tame by comparison, through the derring-do of the James Bond pictures.”
There may be something to this; it’s impossible to know. But as in most such cases, the impeccable style of North by Northwest far outclasses the cheap gaudiness of the Bond pictures. The repartee between Grant and and Eve is similar to that between Bond and his girls only in tone or type; in style and substance, it is of a different caliber altogether. “How does a girl like you get to be a girl like you?” The movie is replete with lines like that. Lehman has admitted that in his script “Nobody ever says anything straight”; nevertheless, “even though it’s perfectly oblique, it’s still perfectly understandable.”
My favorite spoken bit in a movie full of wonderful spoken bits — not just from Roger but from all the characters — comes during that scene when Roger is sneaking through the girl’s hospital room to make his escape through the window. the girl, frightened, yells, “Stop!” Then she puts on her glasses, sees what she’s dealing with, and in a much softer voice, inflected almost as a question, she says, “Stop?” People usually end the story right there when they remember it, but the real payoff comes in what Grant says and does next. He turns around, gives her a reproachful index finger, and makes the curt admonishing sound of “Ah,” as if to scold her for not thinking before opening her mouth, or as if to warn, Don’t try and change your mind now. It’s said that Jimmy Stewart initially wanted the role, but that Hitchcock — no bullshit — deliberately waited until Stewart got cast in something else so that he could go with Grant and still avoid the awkwardness of breaking it to Stewart. This scene is as perfect an example as any of why Hitchcock did us all a great service here.
Justly celebrated is the famous crop-duster sequence, so easy to take for granted today. Hitchcock conceived the idea; Lehman helped him write it; and Grant got his now-iconic blue-grey suit dirty for it. The core intent of the scene was to swerve wide of cliche. Rather than having the would-be victim “in a pool of light under the street lamp” (as Hitch expressed it to Francois Truffaut), Hitchcock would have his man stand amidst nothing but “bright sunshine and a blank, open countryside with barely a house or tree in which any lurking menaces could hide.” They sketched out the route Grant would take in his run from the plane, which on paper turns out to be an altogether more intricate affair than one would have supposed.
Lehman himself could never understand why the plane fires bullet if Vandamm and his men were indeed trying to make the incident look like an accident. The movie is so rife with implausibilities, it’s meaningless to compile a comprehensive catalogue. Once you head down that road, there really is no end in sight. So I’ll stick to two priceless moments of external reality invading the fame.
The first comes when Roger is outside the UN building. Hitchcock couldn’t get permission to film there, so, like a detective on stakeout, he hid his equipment in a van and got the scene as if by surveillance. You can see a gentleman — a real-life citizen, not a paid extra — turn his head when he thinks Cary Grant just walked past him, not knowing it’s merely Roger Thornhill he’s looking at.
Then you’ve got the kid in the Mount Rushmore cafeteria who plugs his ears before Eve even fires off her shot (fake even within the movie’s reality). Did Hitchcock not notice the kid? Was the take so good that he decided to just go with it anyway? As ever with Hitch, mysteries abide.
Then you have all that rear projection as well as those matte paintings (so obviously fake to modern eyes; probably to 1959 eyes, too). They now carry a charm of their own, precisely because of their phony quality, and are best regarded the way one regards cartoon animation, say, or Lehman’s dialogue for that matter — something designed to exist in a world of enhanced movie-ness.
The same goes for Hitchcock’s photography, of course — all those interior overhead shots, oblique angles, and other bravura violations of convention.
When Mount Rushmore has come into view, we know we’re approaching the grand finale. If the whole sequence is not nearly so monumental as Hitchcock intended, at least it carries a strangeness that stays with you. And at least the mountain-high antics and replicated statues don’t look nearly as fake as one would have expected, given the rest of the film.
An exception must be made, however, for when we see Roger and Eve oh-so-casually hanging on to a ledge for dear life, looking very much like two people who’ve come up for a breather and a casual chat at the edge of a swimming pool. It’s as if the two of them and their director are just daring us to say we don’t like it, to look down and claim that this movie is anything less than the best entertainment has to offer.
