North by Northwest
By Bill Warren
"It's so horribly sad," says one character, "how is it I feel like laughing?" In a sense, replacing "sad" with "suspenseful," this could be said about "North by Northwest" itself. Alfred Hitchcock and his screenwriter Ernest Lehman intended it as a kind of summing-up of Hitchcock's career, the ultimate Hitchcock movie. And that's pretty much what it is, in that it's a lot like the British movies that first established Hitchcock's international reputation, such as "The 39 Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes." These demonstrated Hitchcock's shrewdly-used capacity to generate not just suspense, but nerve-wracking tension--while still keeping the films light enough they are frequently and authentically funny. That's exactly what "North by Northwest" does.
The supplemental material surprisingly reveals that initially Hitchcock intended to cast James Stewart as the man on the run, but then cast Cary Grant instead. Grant is, of course, perfect in the role, maybe his best ever, certainly his most emblematic, most "typical." Dazzlingly handsome, witty, funny, inventively getting himself out of one jam after another--it's clear that this movie was pretty much the template for the James Bond movies that soon followed (and show no sign of actually ending). Roger Thornhill, Grant's character, is dapper, handsome, insouciant, a bit bewildered but soon on the top of every situation. He's not a killer like Bond, but in most other ways, including his devastating attractiveness, Thornhill is James Bond fitted to a comedy thriller.
The plot wasn't of major concern to either Hitchcock or Lehman; the point was to send a man on the run from authorities and almost everyone else, a man who has to prove his innocence and rescue the heroine by the end of the movie. As the movie opens to Bernard Herrmann's superb, driving title music and Saul Bass's imaginative slanted credits, we're already caught up; when it says "directed by Alfred Hitchcock" (over a shot of the director himself missing a Manhattan bus), we're in its hands. Thornhill is a busy, thoroughly professional advertising man (feeling "heavyish," he tells his secretary to post a note: "Think thin," who's mistaken by some bad guys (Adam Williams, Robert Ellenstein) for a U.S,. agent George Kaplan. Before Thornhill has a moment to think, he's taken captive and driven to a lavish Long Island estate.
There, he's confronted by suave, urbane James Mason, who seems to be Lester Townsend (we later learn his name is Vandamm). Thornhill protests that he's not Kaplan, but "Townsend" is sure he has his man. He turns the surprised Thornhill over to his assistant Leonard (Martin Landau) and the two smooth thugs. They pour a bottle of booze town Thornhill's throat, put him in a convertible on a twisting seacliff road, and leave him to his fate. But Thornhill comes to enough to take over driving, and gets himself to safety way down the hill. He's jailed for drunkenness
Freed the next day, the angry, curious Thornhill learns Townsend is speaking at the U.N. There he mees Townsend, who's not the man from the mansion, and who is almost immediately killed by a knife thrown by one of Vandamm's thugs. Now sought for murder, Thornhill boards a train for Chicago, which he knows is the next stopping place for whatever is going on.
We learn, well before Thornhill, that there is no such person as Kaplan; that's a bogus person invented by some American agents led by "the professor" (Leo G. Carroll), who have come up with this phantom person to keep the identity secret of their agent within Vandamm's entourage. Vandamm is a broker in international secrets, and is after some microfilm with a big American secret.
On the train to Chicago, for which he has no ticket, Thornhill meets beautiful, blonde Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who shelters him but who has secrets of her own. The plot continues to grow in complexity.
But the great thing about "North by Northwest" is hardly the plot; it's the style of the film, the styles of the individual actors, and the several outstanding sequences of thrills and excitement. The first major sequence, at the showstopper of the movie, is one of the greatest and most absurd such sequences in movie history. Thornhill is lured out of Chicago to the vast empty plain of the Midwest, not a building in site, no one around. One guy shows up to catch a bus, but before boarding it notices a plane off in the distance. "That plane's dustin' crops where there ain't no crops," he says. Soon enough, still clad in his ad man's gray flannel suit, Thornhill is strafed by the crop duster. There's no conceivable reason why, to knock off Kaplan, the bad guys would lure him out there then shoot him from the air, but you won't be worrying about credibility; as much as the shower murder in "Psycho," this is a bravura demonstration of Hitchcock's skills as a director, an unforgettable, funny scene of thrill building on thrill.
Back in Chicago, there's another masterful sequence, this one not of action, but of wit and tension. Thornhill confronts Vandamm and Eve (he's now sure she's working for Vandamm) at an auction. Vandamm sets up Thornhill to be killed by those thugs, but the creative fugitive comes up with a funny, imaginative means of escaping their clutches.
And now it's on to Mount Rushmore. The movie began as an idle Hitchcock thought of years before: a man has to take refuge on the giant stone nose of Lincoln at the monument, and then has to sneeze, giving himself away. This doesn't happen, but what does is better. It begins with the now wised-up Thornhill having to rescue Eve from the stylish house Vandamm owns on top of Mount Rushmore. And that leads to Thorndike and Eve fleeing down the sculpted heads.
This is a great movie, not rich in human insight, but Hitchcock always claimed that while some directors' movies were slices of life, his were slices of cake. He's probably the greatest entertainer, in that sense, in movie history, and this is one of his masterpieces.
It's been given masterful treatment in this high-definition transfer. The movie was shot in VistaVision, an unusual process in which 35mm film went through the camera sideways, giving a larger area to be exposed; this area was then printed down to standard 35mm (although a few theaters did have VistaVision projectors), and it had far greater clarity and definition than the usual 35mm of the day. (VistaVision cameras are still sometimes used to shoot special effects.) This is, therefore, a case of a movie that already had greater clarity, higher definition, being presented in high-definition video, and it's a treasure to behold. You can count the leaves on the front of the Townsend mansion, you can feel the weave of Grant's gray flannel suit; blacks are blacker and yet more detailed--you can see more in shadowed areas than on previous video releases of this film. Robert Boyle's production design is beautiful and inventive, especially in the scenes at Vandamm's cantilevered house--every possible angle is creatively used.
The rear-screen projection, used throughout, looks better here, although the scenes on the Mount Rushmore faces do include a couple of matte shots that are still a bit wobbly. But it doesn't matter; it's all terrific.
And so is the cast. As mentioned earlier, this is possibly the highlight of Cary Grant's career. He was in several Hitchcock films earlier, including the well-regarded "Notorious" (a scene here in which Thornhill is unexpectedly embraced by an emotional Eve is practically the main plot of "Notorious" in two minutes), but by this time, Archie Leach had honed his Cary Grant persona to its sharpest edge, its most gleaming perfection. Grant doesn't make a single wrong move, and the audience is with him all the way. Grant himself sometimes said "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." Here he is Cary Grant, the greatest movie star the world has ever known.
The supporting cast is fine, too, with a typically smooth, sinister performance by James Mason, and an arch performance by Martin Landau; with the help of the script and Hitchcock, he even got away with referring to "my feminine intuition" without the censors realizing it was an admission of homosexuality. Eva Marie Saint had been in mostly very serious movies before, such as "On the Waterfront," but she silkily embodies the Hitchcock ice princess perfectly. She appears in some of the supplemental material, saying this is one of her favorite roles, ever.
There's quite a bit of supplemental material. The featurette "North By Northwest--One for the Ages" includes cirectors Guillermo del Toro, Curtis Hanson, William Friedkin and others. (It also includes the pompous, ineffective Camille Paglia.) This is an okay featurette, but as it goes through the movie scene by scene, we really don't need it. "Destination Hitchcock," which includes Hitchcock's daughter Patricia, Ernest Lehman, Martin Landau, Robert Boyle and others is a thorough, satisfying "making of" about the film. Yet another featurette, "The Master's Touch," is an attempt at analyzing Hitchcock's style. Martin Scorsese pokes his head in briefly, as does John Carpenter, Donald Spoto, Steven DeRosa, Ben Burtt and many others. However, this is seriously handicapped by being limited only to scenes from Hitchcock movies that are owned by Warner Brothers; there's nothing at all from his early British movies, and nothing from his movies from "Psycho" to the end of his career, as those are owned by Universal.
However, you're not considering buying this because of the extras; you're looking at it as a Blu-ray showcase, and that it is. But even in snowy black-and-white on small screen TV, "North by Northwest" is a wonder, a fast-paced thriller with a sensational cast; it's a Hitchcock masterpiece.
Director/cast: Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, James Mason, Eva Marie Saint, Martin Landau,
