Encyclopedia
North by Northwest is a 1959
MGM thriller by
Alfred Hitchcock and is generally considered one of his best works. It is a tale of mistaken identity, with an innocent man pursued across America by agents of a mysterious organisation who want to stop his interference in their plans to smuggle out some
microfilm .
The
film stars
Cary Grant,
Eva Marie Saint,
James Mason,
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". It is one of several Hitchcock movies with a film score by Bernard Herrmann. The film also features a famous title sequence by the graphic designer
Saul Bass.
Plot
A Madison Avenue
advertising executive, Roger O. Thornhill , is mistaken for a non-existent government agent named George Kaplan. He is seized by two enemy agents at
New York’s famous
Plaza Hotel and taken to the house of Lester Townsend. There he is interrogated by a man claiming to be Townsend, but who is really Phillip Vandamm . Vandamm becomes frustrated when Thornhill repeatedly denies he is Kaplan and orders his agents to get rid of him.
They force a large quantity of
bourbon down Thornhill's throat and place him in a stolen car, intending to stage a fatal accident. He breaks free and after an exciting drive on a perilous road, crashes. Thornhill is immediately apprehended by the police and charged with drunk driving. He tries to convince the police, the judge and his mother that he was kidnapped and forced to drink the liquor, but they are all skeptical, especially when the woman posing as Townsend's wife informs them that he is a
United Nations diplomat.
Realising that the only way to prove the truth of his far-fetched story is to locate George Kaplan, Thornhill visits Kaplan’s hotel room at the Plaza Hotel, where he finds a photograph of the man he believes is Townsend.
Narrowly escaping capture, Thornhill catches a taxi to the
General Assembly building of the United Nations, where Townsend is due to deliver a speech. When he asks to speak to him, Thornhill is surprised to find that he is not the man who interrogated him. He shows Townsend the photograph he found. At that moment, one of Vandamm’s accomplices stabs Townsend, who falls forward into Thornhill’s arms. Unthinkingly, Thornhill removes the knife from the victim and a passing photographer captures the scene, forcing him to flee.
Going to
Grand Central Station, Thornhill sneaks on a
20th Century Limited train going to
Chicago. Onboard, he meets the blonde Eve Kendall , who helps Thornhill evade the policemen searching the train, by hiding him two times, once in the overhead, fold-up bunk in her compartment.
Arriving at
Chicago, Thornhill borrows the uniform of one of the station’s red-capped porters, and carries Eve’s luggage through the crowd. Although the police are alerted to his disguise, the sheer number of porters allows Thornhill to elude them. Meanwhile, Eve meets with one of Vandamm’s henchmen, and lies to Thornhill about arranging a meeting with George Kaplan.
In one of the iconic scenes of the movie, Thornhill travels by bus to meet Kaplan at a remote crossroads in the middle of a perfectly flat, open countryside. The only other person in sight is a man who is dropped off by a car and waits at the bus stop. Before boarding the next bus in the opposite direction and leaving Thornhill alone, he observes that a
cropduster is "dusting crops where there ain't no crops." Without warning, the plane flies towards Thornhill and starts shooting at him. He dives for cover, is chased through a cornfield and dusted with pesticide. Finally, Thornhill flags down a gasoline tanker, which stops barely in time. The plane then crashes into it, triggering a large explosion. Taking advantage of the resulting rubbernecking, Thornhill steals a pickup truck.
Thornhill drives back to Chicago's
Ambassador Hotel where he believes George Kaplan has a room. He is surprised to be told that Kaplan checked out earlier that day , leaving a forwarding address in
Rapid City,
South Dakota. Doubting her honesty, Thornhill visits Eve in her room and is asked to stay away. He removes his suit for cleaning and ironing, and pretends to take a shower as she leaves for a meeting. Using a pencil to reveal the indentations on a notepad, Thornhill learns her destination and follows her to an art auction.
At the auction, Thornhill once more comes face to face with Vandamm. Vandamm bids for and purchases a Himalayan statue. It becomes clear that he still believes that Thornhill is George Kaplan. Indeed, he accuses Thornhill of overacting the role of the innocent bystander. After being threatened once more, Thornhill tries to leave, only to find all exits covered by Vandamm’s men. To avoid capture, he deliberately makes a scene, placing nonsensical bids, and is arrested by the police. As they drive to the police station, the officers are ordered to take him to
Midway Airport , despite Thornhill’s admission that he is the fugitive UN killer.
Thornhill is met by The Professor , the spymaster who created the imaginary Kaplan in an attempt to entrap Vandamm. He persuades Thornhill to assist his unnamed agency in stopping Vandamm from smuggling microfilmed secrets out of the country by revealing that Eve is really an undercover agent, whose life was now in danger because of his interference.
At the cafeteria at the base of
Mount Rushmore, Thornhill meets with Eve and Vandamm. He offers to allow Vandamm to leave the country unhindered in exchange for Eve. The deal is refused. In the ensuing struggle, Eve shoots Thornhill and flees. Vandamm and his henchman quickly depart, as the apparently critically wounded Thornhill is taken away by stretcher in a station wagon, accompanied by The Professor. The makeshift ambulance is driven to a secluded spot, where Thornhill emerges unharmed to meet privately with Eve. He becomes highly agitated when he learns that Eve is taking advantage of the "shooting" to get Vandamm to take her with him, so that she can gather further intelligence. The "park ranger" driver then knocks Thornhill unconscious with a punch. Thornhill wakes up in the hospital, locked in his room under guard to prevent his further meddling. He talks The Professor into getting a bottle of bourbon, changes his clothes, and escapes out a window.
Thornhill arrives at Vandamm’s mountainside home. He scales the outside of the building and slips inside undetected. He watches as Leonard convinces his boss Vandamm that the shooting he witnessed was faked by firing the gun at him. Vandamm decides to throw Eve out of the plane once they are airborne. Thornhill manages to warn her.
Moments before she is about to board the plane, Eve escapes with the microfilm, which was hidden in the Himalayan statue purchased by Vandamm at the auction in Chicago, and joins Thornhill. They are chased across the Presidential faces on
Mount Rushmore. Eve slips and clings to the mountainside. Thornhill reaches down and grabs one of her hands, while precariously steadying himself with his other hand. Above them, a gloating Leonard arrives and begins grinding his shoe on Thornhill's hand. They are saved from a fatal fall by the timely arrival of The Professor and a police marksman, who shoots Leonard.
Thornhill pulls Eve to safety and the film smoothly cuts to him pulling her into an overhead train bunk, where they are spending their honeymoon. The final scene shows their train speeding into a tunnel.
Origins
John Russell Taylor's official biography of Hitchcock,
, 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 Herrman 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
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 most of Hitchcock's ideas were no good. It was true that Lehman created the crop duster scene. 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.
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 Ortis 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 travelling 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" 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 John Michael Hayes — Alfred Hitchcock collaboration. When Lehman came onboard, the travelling 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".
Analysis
Alfred 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 said that he wanted to do something fun, light-hearted, and generally free of the symbolism permeating his other movies. Hitchcock, however, was not above inserting a
Freudian joke as the last shot . Despite its frothy appearance, the movie carries a number of underlying themes, the most important being the metafictional themes of
theater 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."
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, without realizing that he was quoting the very words he would speak when playing the role of Thornhill. In fact, even the title
North by Northwest refers to a
compass direction that does not exist , thereby adding to the fantasy of the film, as Hitchcock noted in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in 1963.
The plot of this film is one of the purer versions of Alfred Hitchcock's idea of the "MacGuffin", the thing that everyone in the movie is going for, but in reality could be anything at all and which serves no real purpose. In
North by Northwest, the spies are attempting to smuggle
microfilm containing government secrets out of the country and try to kill Thornhill, whom they believe is the fictitious agent George Kaplan on their trail.
There are similarities between this movie and Hitchcock's earlier film
Saboteur , 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 and best in a long line of "wrong man" films that Hitchcock made according to the pattern he established in
The 39 Steps .
Awards
North by Northwest was nominated for three
Academy Awards for Film Editing , Art Direction, and Original Screenplay . The film also won, for Lehman, a 1960 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. It is #40 on the
American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Movies, #4 on its 100 Years, 100 Thrills, and is consistently in the top 25 on the
Internet Movie Database's Top 250. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the
Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Trivia
- When Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant escape with the microfilm-filled statue near the end of the film, Grant says "I see you've got the pumpkin." This is a reference to the Soviet espionage case of several years earlier involving diplomat Alger Hiss. Journalist Whittaker Chambers had hidden microfilm of government secrets in a pumpkin on his farm. Hiss had given the microfilm to Chambers in the 1930s when they were both working as Soviet spies.
- When Grant, waiting in Eve's hotel room in Chicago for his dusty suit to be sponged and pressed, pretends to take a shower, he whistles the theme song from the 1952 movie Singin' in the Rain.
- North By Northwest has been referenced and parodied in many works, mostly for the cropduster scene. The Simpsons is an Emmy [i] and Peabody [i]-winning American [i] animated [i] ...
parodied the scene in three episodes . The film is also used as a plot engine in the Family Guy is an American [i] animated comedy [i] created b ...
episode "North by North Quahog
...
." A direct reference is made in
Arizona Dream by
Emir Kusturica, where one of main characters is obsessed with playing the crop duster scene. Perhaps the most famous take-off on this scene is a recreation of it in the
James Bond film,
From Russia With Love, published in 1957 [i], is the fifth James Bond [i] novel written by Ian Fleming [i] ...
, in which Bond is chased through a field by a small helicopter which acts as a variation on the crop duster. The crop scene was also parodied in the
Halloween episode of
That '70s Show is an American [i] television [i] sitcom [i] that c...
third season, where
Michael Kelso is being attacked by a remote-controlled
model airplane.
- The cropduster sequence, set in northern Indiana, was actually shot on location near the towns of Wasco and Delano, north of Bakersfield, in Kern County, California.
- The house at the end of the movie 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.
- Two sections of dialogue between Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant on board the train were used by UK train operator Virgin Trains in their acclaimed 2005 commercial "The Return of the Train". The short film shows scenes set onboard trains from various movies including North by Northwest, Some Like it Hot is a 1959 [i] comedy [i] film [i] directed by Billy Wilder [i]. ...
and Murder on the Orient Express with the actors transposed to the setting of a modern Virgin Pendolino express train.
- Eva Marie Saint's line was redubbed during the dining car seduction scene. 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 line was too risque for the time.
- The striking Saul Bass title sequence, featuring angled words sliding up and down the sides of Madison Avenue office buildings, remains so memorable that in 2006 it is the inspiration for the design of all upcoming-programming interstitials on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel.
- Jessie Royce Landis, who played Cary Grant's mother, was only eight years older than him. Amusingly enough, she also played his future mother-in-law in To Catch a Thief.
- In Wu Ming's novel 54, Cary Grant is sent by MI6 to a secret diplomatic mission in Yugoslavia. He travels under a false name: George Kaplan.
- Anthony Horowitz, the author of the Alex Rider Adventures, wrote a book called South By Southeast. It is believed to be a parody of this movie, as there are several cases of mistaken identity and a character named McGuffin. It is a comedy in the Diamond Brothers Mysteries series.
References
External links
