North by Northwest

North by Northwest is a 1959 MGM thriller by Alfred Hitchcock and is generally considered one of his best works. 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 (played by Cary Grant), is mistaken for a non-existent government agent named George Kaplan, and pursued across America by agents of a mysterious organisation who want to kill him, afraid that he will uncover their plans to leave the country with some microfilm (the content of which is never revealed).

After being seized by two enemy agents at New York’s famous Plaza Hotel, Thornhill is taken to the house of Lester Townsend. There he is interrogated by a man claiming to be Townsend, but who is really Phillip Vandamm (James Mason). 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, the car crashes. Thornhill is apprehended by the police 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 sceptical, especially when the housekeeper at Townsend's house informs them that Townsend is a diplomat at the United Nations.

Realising that the only way to prove the truth of his far-fetched story is to locate George Kaplan, Thornhill enlists his mother’s help and 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 Townsend, Thornhill is surprised to find that he is not the man who had 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, causing Thornhill to flee to a taxi outside the UN building.

Going to Grand Central Station, Thornhill sneaks on a 20th Century Limited train going to Chicago. Aboard, he meets the blonde Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) who helps Thornhill evade the police who are 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 red-caps allows Thornhill to escape capture. Meanwhile, Eve (who is Vandamm's lover) 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 countryside (supposedly in northern Indiana, but actually shot on a location in Kern County, Calfifornia). 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 in the vast, empty prairie, he notes 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 just in time. The plane then crashes into it, triggering a large explosion, which causes cars and trucks to stop to rubberneck. Taking advantage of the ensuing mayhem, Thornhill steals a vehicle belonging to one of the passers-by, a pickup truck with a refrigerator in its bed.

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 (before Eve claimed to have spoken to him), leaving a forwarding address in Rapid City, South Dakota. Doubting her honesty, Thornhill visits Eve’s room and is asked by her to stay away. Thornhill removes his suit for cleaning and ironing, and pretends to take a shower as Eve leaves for a meeting. Using a pencil to reveal the indentations of a note, Thornhill determines 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 wins an auction lot, a Himalayan statue, and 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 in the auction, and is arrested by the police. As they drive to the police station, the officers are ordered to take him to Midway Airport (where a gate for Northwest Airlines is seen), despite Thornhill’s admission that he is the fugitive UN killer.

Thornhill is met by The Professor (Leo G. Carroll), the spymaster who created the imaginary Kaplan in an attempt to entrap Vandamm. He persuades Thornhill to assist his agency, seemingly the CIA, 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 (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 offer is refused and in an ensuing struggle, Eve shoots Thornhill and then flees. Vandamm and his henchman quickly depart, and the apparently critically wounded Thornhill is taken away by stretcher in a Parl Service station wagon, accompanied by The Professor. The makeshift ambulance is driven to a secluded spot, where Thornhill emerges unharmed to meet privately with Eve. Thornhill becomes highly agigtated when he learns that the plan is for Eve to continue to accompany Vandamm overseas so that she can gather further intelligence. The "park ranger" driver then knocks Thornhill unconscious with a punch to the face. Eve dashes back alone to Vandamm's hideout in her car, with the cover story that she was forced to take a long way around to avoid being stopped by the police following the shoooting. Thornhill wakes up in the hospital, locked in his roon under guard by The Professor to prevent his further meddling. He talks The Professor in going out to get them a bottle of bourbon, changes his clothes, and escapes out a window.

The climax begins in Vandamm’s mountainside home, where Thornhill arrives undetected by cab, apparently telling the driver that he wanted to see Mount Rushmore at night. Thornhill scales the outside of the building and slips inside undetected. He watches as Leonard (Martin Landau) convinces his boss Vandamm that the shooting he witnessed was faked by firing the gun (filled with blanks) at him. Leonard says that this was a suspicion he arrived at by his "woman's intuition", strongly implying a homosexual relationship, or at least homosexual desire, between him and his employer. Vandamm decides to throw Eve out of the plane they are taking once they are airborne. Thornhill manages to warn her.

Moments before she is about to board the plane with Vandamm, Eve escapes with the microfilm and joins Thornhill. (He was supposed to create a diversion to help her get away, but was held up by the armed housekeeper – he finally realized she was holding the gun with the blanks.) There is a heart-stopping chase across the Presidential faces on Mount Rushmore. Finally, 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, 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. Vandamm is captured and the microfilm recovered.

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. In a Freudian sexual reference, the final scene shows their train speeding into a tunnel.

Origins

John Russell Taylor's official biography of Hitchcock, The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (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 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 The Making of North by Northwest 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 / 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 (which, notably, made it past contemporary censors). 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 (the correct term is "North-northwest"), thereby adding to the fantasy of the film, as Hitchcock noted in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in 1963. (The title does make sense in reference to when Thornhill travels northwest from Chicago Midway Airport via Northwest Airlines.)

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 (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 and best in a long line of "wrong man" films that Hitchcock made according to the pattern he established in The 39 Steps (1935).

Awards

North by Northwest was nominated for three Academy Awards for Film Editing (George Tomasini), Art Direction, and Original Screenplay (Ernest Lehman). 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.

North By Northwest has been referenced and parodied in many works, mostly for the crop duster scene. The Simpsons parodied the scene in three episodes (one with a young Marge Simpson, one with Elton John, and another with Dr. Hibbert pursuing Bart Simpson). The film is also used as a plot engine in the Family Guy 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, in which Bond is chased through a field by a small helicopter which acts as a variation on the crop duster.

During an early scene, Grant's character exclaims "What a performance!" to one of Vandamm's gang in Townsend's house after he was kidnapped the previous day. This was a catch phrase of Sid Field, a British music hall comedian whom Grant admired but who died prematurely in 1950. It was possibly inserted by Grant as an undisguised tribute to Field.

Two sections of dialogue between Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant onboard 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 and Murder on the Orient Express with the actors transposed to the setting of a modern Virgin Pendolino express train.

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.