North by Northwest



Dir:  Alfred Hitchcock (1959)



"You gentlemen aren't really trying to kill my son, are you?"



North by Northwest occupies an fascinating position in the filmography of Alfred Hitchcock.  Having off-loaded his most profoundly emotional piece the previous year, the hallucinatory heartache that was "Vertigo" (1958), Hitchcock sprang back with the most luxurious and glamorous entertainment of his career - "North by Northwest".  

It wasn't originally planned that way, however.   In 1958, Hitchcock had been hired by MGM to work with writer Ernest Lehman on an adaptation of "The wreck of the Mary Deare".   Unable to work up any enthusiasm for the project however, Lehman quickly proposed to Hitchcock a happier alternative - he wanted to write a completely original work which would also be the ultimate Hitchcock chase thriller.  Immediately enthused by the idea (and possibly keen to get back to having a little fun with his storytelling after the angst of Vertigo), Hitchcock told him to go ahead.

I saw "North by Northwest" on the big screen at the BFI last week.  The first observation to be made about the film in its early stages is how snappily it gets down to business: we are barely five minutes in before Cary Grant as super-confident Madison Avenue man Roger Thornhill is kidnapped at gunpoint by spies who have mistaken him for another man, George Caplan.  In another ten minutes, he survives the first of several attempts made on his life throughout the movie.  Hitchcock's American films up to this point had typically worked their way into their narratives far more gradually.   Shooting across America, from New York to North Dakota, in the autumn of 1958, "North by Northwest" emerges as a particularly fast-moving and action-filled movie by the standards of the late 1950s - and indeed by Hitchcock's own standards.   It's also a fantastic big screen experience.

It has been suggested that Ernest Lehman's incident-packed script, more set-piece driven than probably any other Hitchcock, is the prototype for the Hollywood blockbuster, and Bond movies in particular.   If so, when watching the film now, one can only marvel at the precision of the storytelling and the lightness of touch that modern movies can only dream of.   "North by Northwest" is a crazy, colourful, comic nightmare of a movie; the idea of an innocent man being mistaken for another man, nearly killed as a result, later on accused of murder, and finally being chased across America by spies (who want him dead) and cops (who want to lock him up for something he didn't do) really isn't at all funny.  Actually, it's positively Kafka-esque: Grant's Roger Thornhill is put through terrifying ordeal after terrifying ordeal as he tries to figure out what the hell's happening to him and why, but Hitchcock treats all of this as though it were the breeziest of comedies.

How innocent is Thornhill really though?   Well, he's obviously no killer - Cary Grant characters don't go round stabbing people in the back, after all - but in the opening scenes of the film, he is presented to us as a charming though casually amoral advertising executive, somewhat lacking in substance, a master at manipulating the world around him to his advantage.  He expertly does one poor soul out of his taxi in the first scene as though this were part of his daily routine.  He leaves most of his less glamorous chores to his PA, all the better to enjoy his daily round of business meetings and swanky lunches at the Plaza.   "There is no such thing as a lie in advertising" he casually drawls to his PA in the back of a taxi, "only the expedient exaggeration".   If Mad Men's Don Draper has a progenitor, then it's surely Roger O Thornhill.  By the end of his adventures however, Thornhill has emerged as a man of genuine substance, a man fully able to commit to a woman he has fallen head over heels in love with, slinky American agent Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint).   At its heart then, "North by Northwest" is the story of a man who goes looking for a man who doesn't exist, and instead finds himself for the first time.   This is as much a road movie as anything else, and the Roger Thornhill we wind up with in North Dakota is quite a different man from the one we met in New York.

Opening with a chic, voguish title sequence courtesy of Saul Bass, we are plunged into a typical day on Madison Avenue - people swarming like ants in and out of building, subways and vehicles.  Thornill is virtually indistinguishable in this setting, but he's clearly completely at ease here.   At exactly midway point however, the film dumps Thornhill into the middle of a desert outside Chicago as he waits for the increasingly elusive Mr Caplan.   Here Thornhill has not only been robbed of his identity, but also of his very environment.   There are no buildings, no other people, just a crop-dusting plane dusting crops where there ain't no crops.  There is little I can say about this famous sequence that hasn't been already written about countless times in various Hitchcock retrospectives over the years, except to say that the careful use of silence, space, sudden intrusive ambient noises, and pace add up to a masterclass in how to construct a suspense set piece.

The authorities come over very badly in this film, as they do in all of Hitchcock.   The American secret service is supposedly headed up by a kind-faced, mild-mannered, bespectacled gentleman known only as "The Professor", who thinks nothing of leaving Thornhill at the mercy of the wolves if it can benefit his investigation into the activities of enemy spy Philip Van Damm (ultra-smooth, unflappable James Mason).   The Professor's and Van Damm's spy games are revealed to be ultimately meaningless (Hitchcock shows no interest whatsoever in Van Damm's smuggling activities, further suggesting that the power struggles between him and the Professor really serve no great purpose).  But Thornhill rescues Eve from both men's clutches, revealing himself in the process to be a genuine romantic hero.

It almost feels inappropriate to be analysing in great detail such a breezy and enjoyable picture, but beneath  all the witty, sexy banter, Robert Burks' luxurious cinematography and the exciting set pieces, this is an astonishingly rich piece of work.   Like Vertigo, North by Northwest benefits from being seen more than once and, if possible, several times.   And if you can, see it on the big screen.   Hitchcock would never make anything this purely entertaining again.