North by Northwest
Alfred Hitchcock (1959)
I like this better than any other Hitchcock film I know, with the possible exception of The 39 Steps. (There are resemblances between them: the hero, accused of murder, on the run; the thread of suspicion that gives tension to the romance between the two leads; the international espionage context – although North by Northwest is specifically for the Cold War era.) I think the two films are streets ahead of the Hitchcock works that are reckoned to be psychologically profound. He may always have enjoyed ‘playing the audience like a piano’: in the case of North by Northwest, the enjoyment is mutual and Hitchcock’s delight in the trompe l’oeil and manipulative possibilities of film infectious. The thrills are preposterously entertaining. Roger Thornhill’s hair-raising drunken drive – his first escape from his abductors – is an appetiser for the celebrated crop-dusting sequence (with its ingeniously gradual build-up) and the climactic scenes on Mount Rushmore (worth waiting for, even though the preparation for them is too obviously protracted). Ernest Lehman’s screenplay is full of clever reversals and stylish, consistently witty dialogue.
There’s an almost metaphorical dimension to the story – Thornhill and Eve Kendall trying to escape from the complicated plot, in which they’re caught up, into an unqualified love affair. Hitchcock is naturally happy to detain them in the hectic machinery of the story for as long as possible but the final cuts from Mount Rushmore to the couple in the upper bunk of a train carriage, then to the train rapidly entering a tunnel, make for a laconically apt happy ending. Layers of double-crossing and shifting loyalties are essential to the piece but Hitchcock and Lehman remove the layers without ever letting the audience relax or losing the process’s element of fun. (Watching the film this time around further lowered my opinion of the recent Duplicity, where the games that Tony Gilroy was playing, and our awareness of them, had an entropic effect.)
The opening credit sequence is auspicious. The amusing Saul Bass titles appear at an angle on the side of a skyscraper and we’re introduced to one of Bernard Herrmann’s very best scores. The music announces from the start that there’s going to be good humour as well as suspense. Hitchcock appears as a man trying to catch a bus on a New York street – he arrives just too late (this moment seems to foreshadow a leitmotif of yellow cab queue-jumping-cum-hijacking in the film). And North by Northwest is – again unusually for a Hitchcock picture – well acted just about all the way through: James Mason and Martin Landau (an A-list spy and his disturbingly faithful henchman respectively) stand out among the supporting cast but Jessie Royce Landis (as Thornhill’s mother) and Leo G Carroll (as the éminence grise of the espionage fraternity) are fine too. Eva Marie Saint, as Eve, works in a way that some other Hitchcock blondes don’t: the plot’s construction makes it hard to get a handle on her character – helps to make her something approaching enigmatic. The careful monotone she affects in the dining-car scene, on her first meeting with Thornhill, soon comes to make sense: Eve has secrets. When Roger surprises her with his safe return from the meeting with the crop-duster, Saint’s only partly successful concealment of the extent of her relief is genuinely affecting.
Cary Grant is the quintessence of film star quality and, within a fairly narrow range of character, a consummate screen actor. As Thornhill, he’s superlative: he looks right as a Madison Avenue advertising executive (North by Northwest was made on the cusp of 1960, the year in which the first series of Mad Men was set). Grant is also the perfect man to play a character who has to keep thinking on the hoof – who makes us laugh and whom we root for at the same time. He performs with a wonderful economy of physical and vocal expression. He has an instinctive rapport with the camera that is never self-aware. Travelling light and wearing the same suit throughout, he stays magically kempt. Cary Grant is the incarnation of the spirit of North by Northwest – shallow but elating. The director, the writer and the star are all aware of the shallowness of the material and understand what can be achieved with it through technical skill and exuberant wit. They have the appetite and the talent to achieve it and they give the audience a marvellous time.
19 June 2009