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North by Northwest (1959) is an 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". The film is one of several Hitchcock movies with a film score by Bernard Herrmann and features a famous title sequence by the graphic designer Saul Bass.
The movie's world premiere took place in the San Sebastian International Film Festival.
Discussion
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Quotations
Ah, Maggie, in the world of advertising, there's no such thing as a lie. There's only the expedient exaggeration. You ought to know that.
From the killer plane in the cornfield to the cliff-hanger on George Washington's nose, it's suspense in every direction!
I don't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.
It's a deadly game of tag and Cary Grant is it!
Man: That's funny...That plane's dustin' crops where there ain't no crops.
The Master of Suspense presents a 3000-mile chase across America!
Encyclopedia
North by Northwest (1959) is an 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". The film is one of several Hitchcock movies with a film score by Bernard Herrmann and features a famous title sequence by the graphic designer Saul Bass.
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).
North by Northwest is cited as the first film to feature kinetic typography.
Plot
A Madison Avenue advertising executive, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), is mistaken for a government agent named George Kaplan. He is seized by two men, Valerian (Adam Williams) and Licht (Robert Ellenstein), at New York City’s Plaza Hotel, 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). Vandamm becomes frustrated when Thornhill repeatedly denies he is Kaplan and orders his right-hand man, Leonard (Martin Landau), to get rid of him.
Thornhill is forced to drink a large quantity of bourbon. Then Valerian and Licht put him in a car, intending to stage a fatal accident. He breaks free and, after an exciting chase on a perilous road, is apprehended and charged with drunk driving. He tries to convince the police, the judge, and his mother (Jessie Royce Landis) that he was kidnapped and forced to drink the liquor, but they are all skeptical, especially when a woman posing as Townsend's wife informs them that Townsend is a United Nations diplomat.
The only way to prove the truth of his farfetched story is to locate George Kaplan. Since Vandamm gave him a breakdown of Kaplan's past and future itinerary, Thornhill visits Kaplan’s hotel room, where he finds a photograph of the man he believes is Townsend. Narrowly avoiding capture when Valerian and Licht appear, Thornhill catches a taxi to the General Assembly building of the United Nations, where Townsend is due to deliver a speech. When he meets him, Thornhill is surprised to find that he is not the man who interrogated him. 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.
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 and then in the bathroom when the porter comes to make up the bed. 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 allows Thornhill to elude them. Meanwhile, Eve (who is Vandamm's lover) lies to Thornhill, telling him she has arranged a meeting with George Kaplan.
In an iconic sequence, 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 opposite bus stop. Before boarding the next bus and leaving Thornhill alone, he remarks that a plane nearby 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 steps in front of a gasoline tank truck, which stops barely in time. The plane then crashes into it, triggering a large explosion. Taking advantage of rubberneckers stopping, Thornhill steals a pickup truck and leaves.
Thornhill now goes to George Kaplan's hotel in Chicago, but is surprised to learn that Kaplan had already checked out (leaving a forwarding address in Rapid City, South Dakota) 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 on a notepad, Thornhill learns her destination. It proves to be an art auction, where once more he comes face to face with Vandamm.
Vandamm purchases a pre-Columbian Tarascan statue. He still believes that Thornhill is George Kaplan. Thornhill tries to leave, only to find all exits covered by Vandamm's men. To avoid capture, he deliberately starts placing nonsensical bids, so the police are called to remove him. Thornhill identifies himself as the fugitive everyone is looking for, 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 imaginary, a fiction created to distract Vandamm from the real government agent—Eve, whose life is now in danger because of Thornhill's interference. 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 quickly 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. The "park ranger" driver then knocks Thornhill unconscious with a punch. He wakes up in a hospital room, locked in to prevent his further meddling, but is able to escape through a window.
Thornhill arrives at Vandamm’s mountainside home. He 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 his boss Vandamm that Eve is a government agent and the shooting was faked, by firing the gun (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 ROT matchbooks and dropping it where she will see it.
Just before she boards the plane, Eve escapes with the statue and joins Thornhill. They are chased across Mount Rushmore by Leonard and Valerian; the latter falls to his death during a fight with Thornhill. When Eve slips and clings desperately to the mountainside, Thornhill reaches down and grabs one of her hands, while precariously steadying himself with his other hand. Above them, 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 shoots Leonard dead. Vandamm, already under arrest, watches the scene passively and scoffs that it "wasn't very sporting" to use real bullets.
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.
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. 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."
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 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" (Lehman's version is that it was "The Man on 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 collaboration with John Michael Hayes. When Lehman came on board, 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".
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. Writer Ernest Lehman has also mocked those who look for symbolism in the film. 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).
The title, North by Northwest, is often seen as having been taken from a line in Hamlet, a work also concerned with the slippery nature of reality. 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. Then the head of the story department at MGM suggested "North by Northwest", but this was still to be a working title. 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". 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.
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).
North by Northwest has been referred to as "the first James Bond film" 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.
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.
Casting
James Stewart was the original choice to play Thornhill, but Hitchcock replaced him with Grant after the poor box office performance of Vertigo, which Hitchcock blamed on Stewart looking too old to still attract audiences. In reality, Grant was four years older than Stewart.
MGM wanted Cyd Charisse for the role later taken by Eva Marie Saint. Hitchcock stood by his choice of Saint as she won the role.
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. 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. This sentiment has been echoed by writer Todd McEwen, who called it "gorgeous". There is some disagreement as to who tailored the suit: according to Vanity Fair magazine, it was Norton & Sons of London, although according to The Independent it was Quintino of Beverly Hills.
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 featured Alfred Hitchcock presenting himself as the owner of Alfred Hitchcock Travel Agency and tells 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 most well-known in film history.
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). 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.
American Film Institute recognition
In popular culture
1987 Bollywood film Inaam dus Hazaar is a scene for scene remake of North by Northwest.
Family Guy spoofed this film in the Episode North by North Quahog.
External links
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