This article is about the film. For compass directions resembling the title see
Boxing the compass.
North by Northwest is a 1959 American suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason, and featuring Leo G. Carroll and Martin Landau. The screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures".[1] Author Nick Clooney praised Lehman's original story and sophisticated dialogue, calling the film "certainly Alfred Hitchcock's most stylish thriller, if not his best".[2] The film is one of several Hitchcock movies with a film score by Bernard Herrmann and features a memorable opening title sequence by graphic designer Saul Bass. This film is generally cited as the first to feature extended use of kinetic typography in its opening credits.[3]
The movie's world premiere took place in the San Sebastian International Film Festival. North by Northwest is a tale of mistaken identity, with an innocent man pursued across America by agents of a mysterious organization who want to stop his interference in their plans to smuggle out some microfilm (a classic MacGuffin).
Plot
A Madison Avenue advertising executive, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), is mistaken for a government agent named George Kaplan. He is kidnapped by Valerian (Adam Williams) and Licht (Robert Ellenstein) and taken to the house of Lester Townsend. There he is interrogated by a man he assumes to be Townsend, but who is really Phillip Vandamm (James Mason). When Thornhill repeatedly denies he is Kaplan, Vandamm becomes annoyed and orders his right-hand man, Leonard (Martin Landau), to get rid of him.
Valerian and Licht try to stage a fatal car accident, but Thornhill, after a chase on a perilous road, gets himself apprehended and charged with drunk driving. He is unable to get the police, the judge, or his mother (Jessie Royce Landis) to believe what happened to him, especially when a woman posing as Townsend's wife informs them that Townsend is a United Nations diplomat.
Thornhill and his mother go to Kaplan’s hotel room. Narrowly avoiding recapture by Valerian and Licht, Thornhill catches a taxi to the General Assembly building of the United Nations, where Townsend is due to deliver a speech. When he meets Townsend, Thornhill is surprised to find that he is not the man who interrogated him. When Thornhill questions him, Townsend states that his wife is dead. At that moment, Valerian throws a knife that strikes Townsend in the back. He falls forward, dead, into Thornhill's arms. Unthinkingly, Thornhill removes the knife, making it appear that he is the killer. A passing photographer captures the scene, forcing him to flee.
Thornhill (Grant) on the run, attempting to travel incognito.
From Kaplan's itinerary, Thornhill knows he has a reservation at a Chicago hotel the next day. Thornhill goes to Grand Central Terminal and sneaks onto the 20th Century Limited train. On board, he meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who helps Thornhill evade policemen searching the train for him by hiding him twice: once in the overhead, fold-up bunk in her compartment. She asks about his personalized matchbooks with the initials ROT; he says the O stands for nothing. Unbeknownst to Thornhill, Eve notifies Vandamm and Leonard, who are in another compartment.
Arriving at Chicago's LaSalle Street Station, Thornhill borrows the uniform of one of the porters and carries Eve's luggage through the crowd. Although the police are alerted to his disguise, the sheer number of porters saves Thornhill. Meanwhile, Eve (who is Vandamm's lover) lies to Thornhill, telling him she has arranged a meeting with Kaplan.
In an iconic sequence, Thornhill travels by bus to meet Kaplan at an isolated crossroads in the middle of a perfectly flat, open Indiana countryside. The only other person in sight is a man who is dropped off and waits at the opposite bus stop. Before boarding the next bus, he notes that a plane is "dusting crops where there ain't no crops." Without warning, the plane flies towards Thornhill and starts shooting at him. He is chased through a cornfield and dusted with pesticide. Finally, Thornhill steps in front of an oncoming gasoline tank truck, which stops barely in time. The plane crashes into it and explodes. When passing drivers stop to see what is going on, Thornhill steals a pickup truck.
Thornhill goes to Kaplan's hotel, but is surprised to learn that Kaplan had already checked out when Eve claimed to have spoken to him. Thornhill spots Eve in the lobby. He goes to her room, but she tells him to stay away from her. She allows him to stay and use the shower as she leaves. Using a pencil to reveal the indentations of a message on a notepad, Thornhill learns her destination: an art auction.
There, he comes face to face once more with Vandamm. Vandamm purchases a pre-Columbian Tarascan statue. Thornhill tries to leave, only to find all exits covered by Vandamm's men. Thinking quickly, he starts placing nonsensical bids, so the police have to be called to remove him. Thornhill identifies himself as a wanted fugitive, but the officers are ordered to take him to Midway Airport (where a gate for Northwest Airlines is seen, playing on the film's title).
Thornhill meets the Professor (Leo G. Carroll), a spymaster who is trying to stop Vandamm from smuggling microfilmed secrets out of the country. The Professor reveals that George Kaplan is a fiction created to distract Vandamm from the real government agent—Eve, whose life is now in danger because of Thornhill. In order to protect her, Thornhill agrees to help the Professor and his agency fool Vandamm.
At the cafeteria at the base of Mount Rushmore, Thornhill (now pretending to be George Kaplan) meets with Eve and Vandamm. He offers to allow Vandamm to leave the country unhindered in exchange for Eve. The deal is refused. In a staged struggle, Eve shoots Thornhill and flees. Vandamm and Leonard hastily depart, as the apparently critically wounded Thornhill is taken away by stretcher in a station wagon, accompanied by the Professor. When the makeshift ambulance reaches a secluded spot, Thornhill emerges unharmed to speak with Eve privately. He becomes highly agitated when he learns that she is using the "shooting" to get Vandamm to take her with him, so that she can gather further intelligence. Thornhill is knocked out. He wakes up in a locked hospital room, but escapes through a window.
Thornhill arrives at Vandamm’s mountainside home, scales the outside of the building, and slips inside undetected. He learns that the microfilm is in the Tarascan statue, then watches as Leonard convinces Vandamm that Eve is a government agent and the shooting was faked by firing the gun Eve used (filled with blanks) at him. Vandamm decides to throw Eve out of the plane once they are airborne. Thornhill manages to warn her by writing a note inside one of his distinctive matchbooks and dropping it where she will see it.
Just before she boards the plane, Eve escapes with the statue and joins Thornhill. Leonard and Valerian chase them across Mount Rushmore; in a struggle, Thornhill throws Valerian off Mount Rushmore and he falls to his death. When Eve slips and clings desperately to the mountainside, Thornhill grabs one of her hands, while precariously steadying himself with his other hand. Leonard arrives and begins grinding his shoe on Thornhill's hand. They are saved by the timely arrival of the Professor and a police marksman, who kills Leonard-who also falls off Mt Rushmore. The statue breaks open on top of the statue and Vandamm is taken into custody.
The film cuts smoothly from Thornhill pulling Eve to safety on Mount Rushmore to him pulling her into an overhead train bunk, where they are spending their honeymoon. The final shot shows their train speeding into a tunnel.
Cast
Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In North by Northwest he can be seen missing a bus, two minutes into the film.
It is rumored James Stewart was the original choice to play Thornhill,[citation needed] and that Hitchcock replaced him with Grant after the poor box office performance of Vertigo, which Hitchcock supposedly blamed on Stewart looking too old to still attract audiences. In fact, this was not the case, as Hitchcock was planning to reunite with Stewart during his next film, The Blind Man.
MGM wanted Cyd Charisse for the role later taken by Eva Marie Saint. Hitchcock stood by his choice of Saint.[4]
Origins
John Russell Taylor's official biography of Hitchcock, Hitch (1978), suggests that the story originated after a spell of writer's block during the scripting of another movie project:
Alfred Hitchcock had agreed to do a film for MGM, and they had chosen an adaptation of the novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes. Composer Bernard Herrmann had recommended that Hitchcock work with his friend Ernest Lehman. After a couple of weeks, Lehman offered to quit saying he didn't know what to do with the story. Hitchcock told him they got along great together and they would just write something else. Lehman said that he wanted to make the ultimate Hitchcock film. Hitchcock thought for a moment then said he had always wanted to do a chase across Mount Rushmore.
Lehman and Hitchcock spitballed more ideas: a murder at the United Nations Headquarters; a murder at a car plant in Detroit; a final showdown in Alaska. Eventually they settled on the U.N. murder for the opening and the chase across Mount Rushmore for the climax.
For the central idea, Hitchcock remembered something an American journalist had told him about spies creating a fake agent as a decoy. Perhaps their hero could be mistaken for this fictitious agent and end up on the run. They bought the idea from the journalist for $10,000.
Lehman would sometimes repeat this story himself, as in the documentary Destination Hitchcock that accompanied the 2001 DVD release of the film. In his 2000 book Which Lie Did I Tell?, screenwriter William Goldman, commenting on the film, insists that it was Lehman who created North by Northwest and that many of Hitchcock's ideas were not used. Hitchcock had the idea of the hero being stranded in the middle of nowhere, but suggested the villains try to kill him with a tornado.[5] Lehman responded, "but they're trying to kill him. How are they going to work up a cyclone?" Then, as he told an interviewer; "I just can't tell you who said what to whom, but somewhere during that afternoon, the cyclone in the sky became the crop-duster plane."[5]
In fact, Hitchcock had been working on the story for nearly nine years prior to meeting Lehman. The "American journalist" who had the idea that influenced the director was Otis C. Guernsey, a respected reporter who was inspired by a true story during World War II when a couple of British secretaries created a fictitious agent and watched as the Germans wasted time following him around. Guernsey turned his idea into a story about an American traveling salesman who travels to the Middle East and is mistaken for a fictitious agent, becoming "saddled with a romantic and dangerous identity". Guernsey admitted that his treatment was full of "corn" and "lacking logic". He urged Hitchcock to do what he liked with the story. Hitchcock bought the sixty pages for $10,000.
Hitchcock often told journalists of an idea he had about Cary Grant hiding out from the villains inside Abraham Lincoln's nose and being given away when he sneezes. He speculated that the film could be called "The Man in Lincoln's Nose" (Lehman's version is that it was "The Man on Lincoln's Nose"[6]) or even "The Man who Sneezed in Lincoln's Nose", though he probably felt the latter was insulting to his adopted America. Hitchcock sat on the idea, waiting for the right screenwriter to develop it. At one stage "The Man in Lincoln's Nose" was touted as a collaboration with John Michael Hayes. When Lehman came on board, the traveling salesman — which had previously been suited to James Stewart — was adapted to a Madison Avenue advertising executive, a position which Lehman had formerly held. It has also been speculated that Hitchcock felt Stewart was too old and this had hurt their previous collaboration Vertigo, but in fact Hitchcock had planned to reunite with Stewart on his next film "The Blind Man".
Themes and motifs
Hitchcock planned the film as a change of pace after his dark romantic thriller Vertigo a year earlier. In an interview with François Truffaut ("Hitchcock / Truffaut"), Hitchcock said that he wanted to do something fun, light-hearted, and generally free of the symbolism permeating his other movies.[7] Writer Ernest Lehman has also mocked those who look for symbolism in the film.[8] Despite its popular appeal, however, the movie is considered to be a masterpiece for its themes of deception, mistaken identity, and moral relativism in the Cold War era.
The central theme is that of theatre and play-acting, wherein everyone is playing a part, no one is who they seem, and identity is in flux. This is reflected by Thornhill's line: "The only performance that will satisfy you is when I play dead." Significantly, Thornhill is a successful advertising executive (a man who makes his living by distorting reality and deceiving the public). In the role of Thornhill, Grant was distressed with the way the plot seemed to wander aimlessly, and he actually approached Hitchcock to complain about the script. "I can't make heads or tails of it," he said (unwittingly quoting a line that Thornhill utters in the film).[citation needed]
The title, North by Northwest, is often seen as having been taken from a line in Hamlet, a work also concerned with the shifty nature of reality.[9] Hitchcock noted this in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in 1963. Lehman however, states that he used a working title for the film of "In a Northwesterly Direction", because the film was to start in New York and end in Alaska.[6] Then the head of the story department at MGM suggested "North by Northwest", but this was still to be a working title.[6] Other titles were considered, including "The Man on Lincoln's Nose", but "North by Northwest" was kept because, according to Lehman, "We never did find a [better] title".[6] The Northwest Airlines reference in the film plays on the title. The title is not an actual compass direction, the two closest directions being northwest by north (NWbN) and north-northwest (NNW), with the latter traditionally taken as the title's intended meaning.
The plot of this film is one of the purer versions of Alfred Hitchcock's idea of the "MacGuffin", the physical object that everyone in the film is chasing after but which has no deep relationship to the plot. Late in North by Northwest, it emerges that the spies are attempting to smuggle microfilm containing government secrets out of the country. They have been trying to kill Thornhill, who they believe to be the agent on their trail, "George Kaplan". Indeed, the fictitious Kaplan himself could be the "MacGuffin" of the film as Thornhill, as well as the villains, spend most of the movie vainly trying to track him down.[citation needed]
There are similarities between this movie and Hitchcock's earlier film Saboteur (1942), whose final scene on top of the Statue of Liberty foreshadows the Mount Rushmore scene in the later film. In fact, North by Northwest can be seen as the last in a long line of "wrong man" films that Hitchcock made according to the pattern he established in The 39 Steps (1935).[citation needed]
North by Northwest has been referred to as "the first James Bond film"[who?] due to its similarities with the splashily colorful settings and secret agents of the early Bond movies, not to mention the elegantly daring, wisecracking leading man. Based on the strength of North By Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock was seriously considered to direct the first conceived James Bond film by Ivar Bryce (co-owner of Xanadu Productions), Ian Fleming, and Kevin McClory. Hitchcock read the script that would eventually become Thunderball and was interested in directing it. Later the team shared doubts about Hitchcock's involvement because of his minimum salary requirement and the amount of control over the picture they would have to give up. Hitchcock ultimately passed on the Bond film in order to direct Psycho.[citation needed]
The film's last shot — that of the train speeding into a tunnel during a romantic assignation onboard — is a famous bit of self-conscious Freudian symbolism reflecting Hitchcock's mischievous sense of humor.[citation needed]
A comic relief is after Leonard is shot, Vandamm remarks "That wasn't very sporting - using real bullets."
Production
The filming of North by Northwest took place between August and December 1958 with the exception of a few re-takes that were shot in April 1959.
This was the only Hitchcock film released by MGM. However, it is now owned by Turner Entertainment — since 1996 a division of Warner Bros. — which owns the pre-1986 MGM library.
Filming
At Hitchcock's insistence, the film was made in Paramount's VistaVision widescreen process, making it one of the few VistaVision films made at MGM.
The car chase scene in which Thornhill is drunkenly careening along the edge of cliffs high above the ocean, supposedly on Long Island, was actually shot on the California coast. (Long Island is devoid of precipitous seaside cliffs.)
At the time, the United Nations prohibited film crews from shooting around its New York City headquarters. In an example of guerrilla filmmaking, Hitchcock used a movie camera hidden in a parked van to film Cary Grant and Adam Williams exiting their taxis and entering the building. The cropduster sequence, set in northern Indiana, was shot on location near the towns of Wasco and Delano, north of Bakersfield in Kern County, California. The aircraft seen flying in the scene is a N3N, a World War II Navy pilot trainer. After the war, many were converted for crop dusting. The actual aircraft used survives and has been restored to its wartime markings. The aircraft that hits the truck and explodes is a wartime Stearman (Boeing Model 75) trainer. Like its N3N lookalike, many were used for agricultural purposes through the 1970s. It's assumed that the film company bought a wrecked or worn-out plane for the explosion. At the time they would have been available for as little as a few hundred dollars. The plane was piloted by Bob Coe, a local cropduster from Wasco[10]. Hitchcock placed replicas of square Indiana highway signs in the scene.
The shootout on Mount Rushmore at the end of the film was filmed on a replica constructed in Hollywood.
Set design
The house at the end of the film was not real. Hitchcock asked the set designers to make the set resemble a house by Frank Lloyd Wright, the most popular architect in America at the time, using the materials, form and interiors associated with him. The set was built in Culver City, where MGM was located.
Costuming
The gray suit worn by Cary Grant throughout almost the entire film has taken on somewhat iconic status. A panel of fashion experts convened by GQ magazine in 2006 called it both the best suit in film history, and the most influential on mens' style, stating that it has since been copied for Tom Cruise's character in Collateral and Ben Affleck's character in Paycheck.[11] This sentiment has been echoed by writer Todd McEwen, who called it "gorgeous".[12] There is some disagreement as to who tailored the suit: according to Vanity Fair magazine, it was Norton & Sons of London,[13] although according to The Independent it was Quintino of Beverly Hills.[14]
Editing and post-production
In François Truffaut's book-length interview, Hitchcock/Truffaut (1967), Hitchcock said that MGM wanted North by Northwest cut by 15 minutes so the running time would be under two hours. Hitchcock had his agent check his contract, learned that he had absolute control over the final cut, and refused.
One of Eva Marie Saint's lines in the dining car seduction scene was redubbed. She originally said "I never make love on an empty stomach", but it was changed in post-production to "I never discuss love on an empty stomach". It is said that the censors felt the original version was too risqué.
Release
The trailer for North by Northwest features Alfred Hitchcock presenting himself as the owner of Alfred Hitchcock Travel Agency and telling the viewer he has made a motion picture to advertise these wonderful vacation stops. Today, it is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most famous movies, and the crop-dusting sequence is one of the best-known in film history.[citation needed]
Awards
North by Northwest was nominated for three Academy Awards for Film Editing (George Tomasini), Art Direction (William A. Horning, Robert F. Boyle, Merrill Pye, Henry Grace, Frank McKelvy), and Original Screenplay (Ernest Lehman).[15] The film also won, for Lehman, a 1960 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. In 1995, North by Northwest was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
In June 2008, the AFI revealed its "Ten top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. North by Northwest was acknowledged as the seventh best film in the mystery genre.[16]
American Film Institute recognition[16]
In popular culture
Family Guy spoofed this film in the episode "North by North Quahog", particularly the classic crop dusting scene, the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house, and the Mount Rushmore sequences of the film.
Reference is made to North by Northwest in the 2005 film Lucky Number Slevin in a scene featuring Josh Hartnett and Lucy Liu.
In the video for the Metallica song "I Disappear", guitarist Kirk Hammett was being chased by a plane in the desert imitating the classic plane chase scene.
In the 1977 Mel Brooks comedy High Anxiety which is essentially an extended tribute to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the main character played by Brooks is Richard H Thorndyke a take-off of Roger O. Thornhill. At one point Thorndyke tells Victoria Brisbane (Madelaine Kahn) to meet him at the North by Northwest corner of Golden Gate park. The murder in the hotel lobby, where the killer places the murder weapon in Thorndyke's hand, is similar to the murder at the UN where Thornhill is himself framed (there are at least 13 other Hitchcock films which are parodied in High Anxiety).
In an episode of The Simpsons, entitled Fear of Flying, Marge and her mother are attacked by a crop duster while standing beside a cornfield.
In Arizona_Dream, a reinactment of the crop dusting scene is performed for a talent show while being cut with the original film.
References
- ^ Jaynes, Barbara Grant; Trachtenberg, Robert. Cary Grant: A Class Apart. Burbank, California: Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and Turner Entertainment. 2004.
- ^ Clooney, Nick (November 2002). The Movies That Changed Us: Reflections on the Screen. New York: Atria Books, a trademark of Simon & Schuster. p. 85. ISBN 0-7434-1043-2.
- ^ The Kinetic Typography Engine
- ^ Spoto, Donald (1999). The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. Da Capo. pp. 405. ISBN 030680932X.
- ^ a b John Brady, "The craft of the screenwriter", 1981. Page 202
- ^ a b c d John Brady, "The craft of the screenwriter", 1981. Page 201
- ^ Hitchcock, however, was not above inserting a Freudian joke as the last shot (which, notably, made it past contemporary censors).
- ^ John Brady, "The craft of the screenwriter", 1981. Page 199/200
- ^ The line reads: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly / I know a hawk from a handsaw." (Act II, Scene ii). Hamlet thus hints to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his friends, that his madness is only an act to protect himself while he gathers information on his father's murder.
- ^ The Bakersfield Californian, Wasco man had Hitchcock movie role, 11/Oct/2007
- ^ Cary Grant's suit in “North by Northwest ” named top male fashion trend-setter, SAWF News, October 17, 2006
- ^ Cary Grant's Suit, Todd McEwen, Granta, Summer 2006
- ^ It’s the Hitch in Hitchcock, Jim Windolf, Vanity Fair, March 2008
- ^ Fashion: Suits they are a-changin, Glenn Waldron, The Independent, January 28, 2008
- ^ "NY Times: North by Northwest". NY Times. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/35655/North-By-Northwest/awards. Retrieved on 2008-12-23.
- ^ a b "AFI's 10 Top 10". American Film Institute. 2008-06-17. http://www.afi.com/10top10/mystery.html. Retrieved on 2008-06-18.
External links
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