North by Northwest

North by Northwest
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Alfred Hitchcock
Produced by	Alfred Hitchcock
Written by	Ernest Lehman
Starring	Cary Grant Eva Marie Saint James Mason Jessie Royce Landis
Music by	Bernard Herrmann
Cinematography	Robert Burks
Edited by	George Tomasini
Production company	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release dates	July 28, 1959 (1959-07-28)
Running time	136 minutes
Country	United States
Budget	$4,326,000[1]
Box office	$9.8 million[1]

North by Northwest is a 1959 American action thriller film, made in VistaVision, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason.^[2] The screenplay was by Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures".^[3]

North by Northwest is a tale of mistaken identity, with an innocent man pursued across the United States by agents of a mysterious organization trying to prevent him from blocking their plan to smuggle out microfilm that contains government secrets.

This is one of several Hitchcock films that features a music score by Bernard Herrmann and a memorable opening title sequence by graphic designer Saul Bass. This film is generally cited as the first to feature extended use of kinetic typography in its opening credits.^[4]

North by Northwest is now numbered among the essential Hitchcock pictures and is often listed as one of the greatest films of all time.^[5][6][7] It was selected in 1995 for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress, as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot

Advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for "George Kaplan". Kidnapped by two thugs, he is brought to the Long Island estate of Lester Townsend, and interrogated by spy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason). Vandamm's henchman Leonard (Martin Landau) tries to arrange Thornhill's death, but he manages to escape a staged drunken driving accident.

Thornhill fails to convince his mother and the police that he was kidnapped. A woman at Townsend's home (Josephine Hutchinson) says he got drunk at her dinner party. She says Townsend is a United Nations diplomat. Thornhill searches Kaplan's hotel room, and visits the U.N. General Assembly building. He discovers that Townsend (Philip Ober) is not the man he met on Long Island. Townsend is killed instead of Thornhill, who is then wanted for murder. Thornhill flees and attempts to find the real Kaplan.

Thornhill sneaks onto the 20th Century Limited train. He meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who protects him from the police and sleeps with him. Kendall is actually working with Vandamm and his thugs. In Chicago, Kendall tells Thornhill she has arranged a meeting with Kaplan at an isolated bus stop.

Thornhill waits, but no one comes. He is attacked by a crop duster plane, but steps in front of a speeding tank truck; the airplane crashes into the truck, and Thornhill escapes.

When he reaches Kaplan's hotel in Chicago, he discovers that Kaplan had checked out and left before Kendall said she talked to him on the phone. Thornhill goes to her room, but she leaves. He tracks her to an art auction, where he finds Vandamm and his thugs. Vandamm purchases a Mexican Purépecha statue and departs. Thornhill is trapped, but acts crazy so the police come and take him away. He tells them he is the fugitive murderer; the police release him to FBI chief Professor (Leo G. Carroll), who reveals that Kaplan does not exist, and was invented to distract Vandamm from the real government agent: Kendall. Thornhill agrees to help maintain her cover.

At the Mount Rushmore visitor center, Thornhill (as Kaplan) negotiates Vandamm's turnover of Kendall for her prosecution as a spy. "Kaplan" confronts Kendall; she shoots him "fatally" with a handgun (loaded with blanks), and flees. Thornhill and Kendall meet in a forest. Thornhill discovers Kendall must depart with Vandamm and Leonard on a plane. Thornhill evades the Professor's custody, and goes to Vandamm's house to rescue Kendall.

At the house, Thornhill overhears that the sculpture holds microfilm. Vandamm implies that he will kill Kendall during the flight. Thornhill lets Kendall know they plan to kill her, but he is captured. As Vandamm is boarding the plane, Kendall takes the sculpture and runs to Thornhill. They attempt to flee, but they realize they are on top of Mount Rushmore. They begin to climb down the mountain's sculpture, pursued by two thugs. After a harrowing chase, all turns out well for them.

Later, Thornhill invites Kendall, as the new Mrs. Thornhill, onto the upper berth of a train, which then enters a tunnel.

Cast

Hitchcock's cameo appearances are a signature occurrence in most of his films. In North by Northwest, he is seen getting a bus door slammed in his face, literally just as his credit is appearing on the screen.^[11] There has been some speculation as to whether he made one of his rare second appearances, this time at around the 44-minute mark in drag.^[12]

MGM wanted Cyd Charisse for the role played by Eva Marie Saint. Hitchcock stood by his choice.^[13]

Origins

John Russell Taylor's official biography of Hitchcock, Hitch: 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 film 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.^[14] 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."^[14]

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 British intelligence created a fictitious agent and watched as the Germans wasted time following him around. Guernsey turned his idea into a story about an American traveling 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"^[15]) 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 traveling salesman—which had previously been suited to James Stewart—was adapted to a Madison Avenue advertising executive, a position which Lehman had formerly held. In an interview in the book Screenwriters on Screenwriting (1995), Lehman stated that he had already written much of the screenplay before coming up with critical elements of the climax.^[16]

Production

This was the only Hitchcock film released by MGM. It is currently owned by Turner Entertainment—since 1996 a division of Warner Bros.—which owns the pre-1986 MGM library.

Production costs on North by Northwest were seriously escalated when a delay in filming put Cary Grant into the penalty phase of his contract, resulting in an additional $5,000 per day in fees for the actor, before shooting even began.^[17]

Filming

At Hitchcock's insistence, the film was made in Paramount's VistaVision widescreen process, making it one of only two VistaVision films made at MGM; the other was High Society.^[18]

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, and in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, according to DVD audio commentary.

The cropduster sequence, meant to take place in northern Indiana, was shot on location on Garces Highway (155) near the towns of Wasco and Delano, north of Bakersfield in Kern County, California (35°45′39″N 119°33′41″W / 35.76083°N 119.56139°W / 35.76083; -119.56139).^[19] Years later, in a show at the Pompidou Center called "Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences", an aerial shot of Grant in the cornfield, with a "road cutting straight through the cornrows to the edge of the screen", was said to draw on Léon Spilliaert's "Le Paquebot ou L'Estran", which features "alternating strips of sand and ocean blue bands stretch[ed] to the edge of the canvas."^[20]

The aircraft seen flying in the scene is a Naval Aircraft Factory N3N Canary, a World War II Navy pilot trainer sometimes converted for cropdusting.^[21] 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. The plane was piloted by Bob Coe, a local cropduster from Wasco.^[22] Hitchcock placed replicas of square Indiana highway signs in the scene. In an extensive list of "1001 Greatest Movie Moments" of all time, the British film magazine Empire in its August 2009 issue ranked the cropduster scene as the best.^[23]

Set design

The house near 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.^[24] The set was built in Culver City, where MGM's studios were located. House exteriors were matte paintings.^[25]

Costuming

A panel of fashion experts convened by GQ in 2006 said the gray suit worn by Cary Grant throughout almost the entire film was the best suit in film history, and the most influential on men's style, stating that it has since been copied for Tom Cruise's character in Collateral and Ben Affleck's character in Paycheck.^[26] This sentiment has been echoed by writer Todd McEwen, who called it "gorgeous," and wrote a short story "Cary Grant's Suit" which recounts the film's plot from the viewpoint of the suit.^[27] There is some disagreement as to who tailored the suit; according to Vanity Fair magazine, it was Norton & Sons of London,^[28] although according to The Independent it was Quintino of Beverly Hills.^[29]

Eva Marie Saint's wardrobe for the film was originally entirely chosen by MGM. Hitchcock disliked MGM's selections and the actress and director went to Bergdorf Goodman in New York to select what she would wear.^[30]

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 film's length would run under two hours. Hitchcock had his agent check his contract, learned that he had absolute control over the final cut, and refused.^[31]

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", as the censors considered the original version too risqué.^[32]

Release

The trailer for North by Northwest features Hitchcock presenting himself as the owner of Alfred Hitchcock Travel Agency and telling the viewer he has made a motion picture to advertise these wonderful vacation stops.^[33]

Reception

Time magazine called the film "smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining."^[34] A. H. Weiler of The New York Times made it a "Critic's Pick" and said it was the "year's most scenic, intriguing and merriest chase"; Weiler complimented the two leads:

Cary Grant, a veteran member of the Hitchcock acting varsity, was never more at home than in this role of the advertising-man-on-the-lam. He handles the grimaces, the surprised look, the quick smile, ... and all the derring-do with professional aplomb and grace, In casting Eva Marie Saint as his romantic vis-à-vis, Mr. Hitchcock has plumbed some talents not shown by the actress heretofore. Although she is seemingly a hard, designing type, she also emerges both the sweet heroine and a glamorous charmer.^[35]

Film critic Charles Champlin saw the film as an "anthology of typical Hitchcockian situations", and was particularly taken by the scene and suspense in which Grant's character avoids death when attacked by a crop dusting plane in the cornfields, which he believed was representative of Hitchcock's finest work.^[36]

Box office

During its two-week run at Radio City Music Hall, the film grossed $404,056, setting a record in that theater's non-holiday gross.^[37]

According to MGM records the film earned $5,740,000 in the US and Canada and $4.1 million elsewhere, resulting in a profit of $837,000.^[1]

The London edition of Time Out magazine, reviewing the film nearly a half-century after its initial release, commented:

Fifty years on, you could say that Hitchcock's sleek, wry, paranoid thriller caught the zeitgeist perfectly: Cold War shadiness, secret agents of power, urbane modernism, the ant-like bustle of city life, and a hint of dread behind the sharp suits of affluence. Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill, the film's sharply dressed ad exec who is sucked into a vortex of mistaken identity, certainly wouldn't be out of place in Mad Men. But there's nothing dated about this perfect storm of talent, from Hitchcock and Grant to writer Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success), co-stars James Mason and Eva Marie Saint, composer Bernard Herrmann and even designer Saul Bass, whose opening-credits sequence still manages to send a shiver down the spine.^[38]

Author and journalist Nick Clooney praised Lehman's original story and sophisticated dialogue, calling the film "certainly Alfred Hitchcock's most stylish thriller, if not his best".^[39]

North by Northwest currently holds a 100% approval rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, based on 61 reviews. The site's consensus calls the film "Gripping, suspenseful and visually iconic" and claims it "laid the groundwork for countless action thrillers to follow".^[40]

The film ranks at number 98 in Empire magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Films of All Time.^[41] The Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay No. 21 on its list of 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written.^[42] It is ranked the 40th greatest American film by the American Film Institute.^[43]

Themes and motifs

Hitchcock planned the film as a change of pace after his dark romantic thriller Vertigo a year earlier. In his book-length interview Hitchcock/Truffaut (1967) with François Truffaut, Hitchcock said that he wanted to do "something fun, light-hearted, and generally free of the symbolism permeating his other movies."^[44] Writer Ernest Lehman has also mocked those who look for symbolism in the film.^[45] Despite its popular appeal, the film is considered to be a masterpiece for its themes of deception, mistaken identity, and moral relativism in the Cold War era.

The title North by Northwest is a subject of debate. Many have seen it as having been taken from a line ("I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw") in Hamlet, a work also concerned with the shifty nature of reality.^[46] Hitchcock noted, in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in 1963, "It's a fantasy. The whole film is epitomized in the title—there is no such thing as north-by-northwest on the compass."^[47] ("Northwest by north", however, is one of 32 points of the compass.) Lehman states that he used a working title for the film of "In a Northwesterly Direction," because the film's action was to begin in New York and climax in Alaska.^[15] Then the head of the story department at MGM suggested "North by Northwest," but this was still to be a working title.^[15] 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."^[15] The Northwest Airlines reference in the film plays on the title.

The film's plot involves a "MacGuffin", a term popularized by Hitchcock: a physical object that everyone in the film is chasing 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, whom they believe to be the agent on their trail, 'George Kaplan'.

North by Northwest has been referred to as "the first James Bond film"^[48] due to its similarities with splashily colorful settings, secret agents, and an elegant, daring, wisecracking leading man opposite a sinister yet strangely charming villain. The crop duster scene inspired the helicopter chase in From Russia with Love.^[49]

The film's final shot—that of the train speeding into a tunnel during a romantic embrace onboard—is a famous bit of self-conscious Freudian symbolism reflecting Hitchcock's mischievous sense of humor. In the book Hitchcock / Truffaut (p. 107–108), Hitchcock called it a "phallic symbol... probably one of the most impudent shots I ever made."

Home media

North by Northwest was released on the Blu-ray Disc format in the United States on November 3, 2009 by Warner Bros. with a 1080p VC-1 encoding.^[50][51] This release is a special 50th anniversary edition. A 50th anniversary edition on DVD was also released by Warner Bros.^[52]

Awards

North by Northwest was nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Film Editing (George Tomasini), Best Production Design (William A. Horning, Robert F. Boyle, Merrill Pye, Henry Grace, Frank McKelvy), and Best Original Screenplay (Ernest Lehman) at the 32nd Academy Awards ceremony.^[53] Two of the three awards went instead to Ben-Hur, and the other went to Pillow Talk. The film also won a 1960 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay, for Lehman.

In 1995, North by Northwest was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "10 Top 10"—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.^[54] It was also listed as No. 40 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies, No. 4 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills, and No. 55 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition).

Influences

The film's title is reported to have been the influence for the name of the popular annual live music festival South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, started in 1987, with the name idea coming from Louis Black, editor and co-founder of the local alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle, as a play on the Hitchcock film title.^[55]

The third episode of the Doctor Who serial "The Deadly Assassin" includes an homage to North by Northwest, when the Doctor, who like Hitchcock's hero is falsely accused of a politically motivated murder, is attacked by gunfire from a biplane piloted by one of his enemy's henchmen.^[56]

See also

• List of films considered the best
• List of films with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a film review aggregator website

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to North by Northwest (1959 film).

Wikiquote has quotations related to: North by Northwest

• North by Northwest at the American Film Institute Catalog
• North by Northwest at the Internet Movie Database
• North by Northwest at Rotten Tomatoes
• North by Northwest at AllMovie
• North by Northwest at the TCM Movie Database
• Pauline Kael (July 14, 1975). "American Masters. Cary Grant". New Yorker magazine. p. 3. Archived from the original on 2005-05-25. 
• Christopher D. Morris (1997). "The Direction of North by Northwest". Cinema Journal. 36: 43–56. doi:10.2307/1225612. JSTOR 1225612.