November 2005

North by Northwest

• Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis, Leo G. Carroll, Philip Ober, Martin Landau
• Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
• Theatrical release: 1959
• DVD release: 2000
• Video: Widescreen
• Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
• Released by: Warner Home Video

François Truffaut: North by Northwest, for instance, [is] made up of a series of strange forms that follow the pattern of a nightmare.
Alfred Hitchcock: This may be due to the fact that I’m never satisfied with the ordinary. I’m ill at ease with it.*

By 1959, Alfred Hitchcock was at the absolute peak of his powers. His agent, the powerful Lew Wasserman, had forged a virtually unheard-of contract that gave Hitchcock complete control over artistic, casting, and budgetary issues, as well as any other pertinent decisions to be made about his films.

Hitchcock had been working with writer Ernest Lehman (West Side Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) on a screenplay for The Wreck of the Mary Deare. Lehman gave it a shot but eventually gave up, telling Hitch he just couldn’t do it. Hitchcock still wanted to do a project with Lehman, so he decided to use the budget MGM had given him for Mary Deare to work up another project from scratch. All he told Lehman was two things: he liked the idea of a chase across Mount Rushmore, and he had always wanted to make a film in which someone addressing the United Nations stops and says he will not continue until the delegate from Peru wakes up and pays attention, at which time a colleague pats the Peruvian delegate on the back and he keels over, stabbed to death.

As the script came together, Hitchcock began the search for his cast. James Stewart was desperate to play Roger Thornhill, but Hitchcock silently suspected that his last film, Vertigo, had not had the boffo box office of the other nine movies he made in the 1950s because Stewart was looking older than his 51 years. MGM countered with 43-year-old Gregory Peck, but Hitchcock finally chose a star he had worked with three times before: Cary Grant. Ironically, Grant was four years older than Stewart. But, he carried his age a bit better.

For the female lead, Eve Kendall, MGM asked Hitchcock to cast Cyd Charisse, but the actress was not in the Hitchcock mold. His first choice was the former Grace Kelly, now Princess Grace of Monaco, but there were problems with a monarch doing something as lowly as acting. His second choice was Eva Marie Saint, best known for her Oscar-winning performance five years before in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. She had been typecast in saintly roles, more often than not drably dressed and unattractive. Hitchcock took her to Bergdorf’s couture department, dressed her in the finest clothes of the day, and transformed her into a blonde temptress. Thrilled with the new image, Saint loved the clothes almost as much as the saucy lines Lehman had written for her.

Lehman’s story uses as its canvas mistaken identity, espionage, and counter-espionage, but amplifies some of Hitchcock’s favorite themes, especially the mysterious cool blonde, and amplifies them for the audience interested in seeing more adult themes on the screen. Where Grace Kelly had seared a hole in the screen with innuendo in Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, Eva Marie Saint comes straight to the point in chapter 17 of North by Northwest:

Roger: What I mean is, the moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
Eve: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
Roger: She might find the idea objectionable.
Eve: Then again, she might not.
Roger: Think of how lucky I am to be seated here.
Eve: Oh, luck had nothing to do with it.
Roger: Fate?
Eve: I tipped the steward five dollars to seat you here if you should come in.
Roger: Is that a proposition?
Eve: I never discuss love on an empty stomach.
Roger: You’ve already eaten.
Eve: But you haven’t.
Roger: Don’t you think it’s time we were introduced?

Her delivery of those lines, Grant’s double takes, and Hitchcock’s setups leave little doubt where that night is heading, and in 1959 this was pretty racy stuff. In fact, the line about discussing love on an empty stomach was originally "make love on an empty stomach." Watch carefully -- you can see that Saint’s lips and the soundtrack don’t match. The line was considered just a bit too much. Nonetheless, the entire film is peppered with sexual bons mots, Hitchcock’s equivalents of comic relief.

That relief is needed to cope with the nightmares François Truffaut refers to at the top of this article. Grant’s character is subjected to awful twists of fate, and is also a pawn in a very large game he doesn’t realize is being played. Hitchcock allows us to learn about this as we go along, just as Thornhill does -- until chapter 14, when he begins to expose the MacGuffin. Here is where a little explanation into one of the arcanum of Hitchcock’s method may be in order.

To Hitchcock, the most important issues of any great mystery were not the whodunit parts but their effects on the characters -- the human stories. Are we more interested in who stole the Maltese Falcon, or its effect on all that is happening to Sam Spade? Is Memento about who killed Leonard Shelby’s wife, or about the journey he must go through? Is Crash about who was killed, or about the rippling effects of that death on everyone’s life? Hitchcock believed that filmmakers who leaned on plot devices -- what he called the MacGuffin -- to fuel suspense were simple technicians. He thought the true film artist should realize that the MacGuffin should be disposed of as soon as possible. Sometimes, as in North by Northwest, a film’s most compelling scene had absolutely nothing to do with the MacGuffin -- such as the renowned airplane chase through the cornfields (chapter 25), possibly the single most famous scene in which Cary Grant ever appeared.

Not everyone agreed with Hitchcock. The whodunit had a great tradition, and there was a critical backlash in the 1950s against Hitchcock’s concepts. Some claimed that, by doing away with the MacGuffin, he had nothing to move the plot along, and was just marking time, and that his judgment of the MacGuffin’s ultimate triviality was wrong. Here’s how he explained it to Truffaut:

Hitchcock: My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean the emptiest, the most non-existent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in North by Northwest. The picture is about espionage, and the only question that’s raised in the story is to find out what the spies are after. Well, during the scene at the Chicago airport, the Central Intelligence man explains the whole situation to Cary Grant, and Grant, referring to the James Mason character, asks, "What does he do?"
The counter-intelligence man replies, "Let’s just say that he’s an importer and exporter."
"But what does he sell?"
"Oh, just government secrets!" is the answer.
Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!
Truffaut: That’s right, nothing that is specific . . . And yet, these pictures, hinged around a MacGuffin, are the very ones that some of the critics have in mind when they claim that "Hitchcock’s got nothing to say." The only answer to that is that a filmmaker isn’t supposed to say things; his job is to show them.
Hitchcock: Precisely.
Truffaut: Now, let’s go back to the scene in the cornfield. The most appealing aspect of that sequence with the plane is that it’s totally gratuitous -- it’s a scene that has been drained of all plausibility or even significance. Cinema, approached this way, becomes a truly abstract art, like music. And here it’s precisely that gratuity, which you’re often criticized for, that gives the scene all of its interest and strength. . . . It’s obvious that the fantasy of the absurd is a key ingredient of your filmmaking formula.
Hitchcock: The fact is I practice absurdity quite religiously!

They’re not talking about "ha-ha" absurdity here, but a postwar Parisian school of absurdity defined by Webster’s as seeking "to represent the absurdity of human existence in a meaningless universe by bizarre or fantastic means." This may be the single most important point in understanding Hitchcock. Following the details to figure out the mystery is secondary; the viewer must be willing to get on the roller coaster and ride.

Hitchcock tried to make his narrative flow through the viewer’s subconscious. In Freudian terms, he tries to bypass the viewer’s ego, shove the superego out of the way, and zoom in on the id. Hitchcock’s genius lay in his unwillingness to simply be a stage director filming three-dimensional stage plays. He used film as a medium with its own possibilities. In his mind, film could nag at our deepest fears -- not in the search for the "bad guy," but in being forced into the point of view, or emotional experience, of the protagonist. If he had to make up a crazy scene that was, as Truffaut describes it, "gratuitous" but that instilled a sense of intense menace, then Hitchcock was happy to chose the gratuitous and menacing over the prosaic.

Where you really get a glimpse of genius, one that is deeply personal and won’t be recreated, is in how Hitchcock instills a little of the humorous side of absurdity into his scary scenes, kind of like the favored Grandfather who would tell you scary stories while giving you a hug. A deeply personal aspect of Hitchcock’s genius is his depiction of the humorous side of absurdity in his scary scenes. The scene in the cornfield is a perfect example. Most clichéd death-threat scenes take place at night in a city, in cramped quarters, with a mysterious person lurking nearby, all accompanied by mysterious music aimed at getting our pulses going. Hitchcock thought it would be interesting to make a scary scene in which everything was exactly the opposite: a sunny day in the country, an open field with no one in sight, and no music. The scene does not move the plot forward or advance the development of the Thornhill character, yet it is one of the most iconic scenes in film: Grant in gray suit and tie, being chased through the a cornfield by a biplane, and running for his life. As pure film art, it is one of the greatest three and a half minutes in motion-picture history.

One last point about Hitchcock’s mastery in North by Northwest. While a few of today’s filmmakers try to follow his lead in making films that expand our experience of life by going outside traditional narrative techniques, -- David Cronenberg (rarely), Wong Kar-wai (always), Francis Ford Coppola (occasionally) -- few have been able to achieve Hitchcock’s commercial success. I have great hopes for the futures of Sylvain Chomet, Robert Rodriguez, and Baz Luhrmann. And if anyone could take the mantle (if he doesn’t get lazy or too full of himself), it might be Quentin Tarantino, whose Kill Bill films were masterpieces of Hitchcock’s concept and made money.

North by Northwest was a huge financial success for Hitchcock and MGM, and the biggest hit of Cary Grant’s career. It was nominated for three Oscars but went home empty handed (the big winners for 1959 were Ben-Hur and Room at the Top). As usual, both Grant and Hitchcock were robbed. Neither ever won an Oscar until their careers were ending, when the Academy gave them honorary awards. But North by Northwest’s stature has grown over the years. It’s listed at No.40 on the American Film Institute’s list of the Top 100 Films of all time, No.4 on AFI’s Most Heart Pounding Films, and is in the National Film Registry.

Warner Home Video has done an outstanding job with North by Northwest for this DVD edition. My wife left the room for a moment while I was watching. When she returned, I was on chapter 41, the scene on Mount Rushmore. She gasped and asked me if I was watching the Universal HD satellite channel, the best-looking channel on DirecTV. Does this DVD really look like high-definition video? Not quite, but it’s pretty close. In fact, Warner has announced its first 50 HD DVDs, and North by Northwest is on the list. Given the fact that this DVD was mastered in 2000, I doubt they were working from a high-definition master, but who knows? Warner obviously at least began with a nice clean print and did some careful digital mastering. Edge enhancement is a slight problem in a few spots, but you’ll have to be pretty critical to find them.

The extras are a marvelous bunch, from the commentary track by screenwriter Ernest Lehman to the superb making-of feature with Lehman, Hitchcock’s daughter, Martin Landau, and Eva Marie Saint. Of special interest to film-score fans, you can isolate Bernard Herrmann’s masterpiece of an orchestral score in mostly superb sound (oddly, some surround and some mono) and get a master class in why Hitchcock kept using this irascible, grumpy composer.

North by Northwest is available in a number of different editions. The least expensive is the single-disc version ($15), which is perfectly adequate. For the obsessed there is the Limited Edition Collector’s Set ($72), which gives you a huge slipcase, a plaque, a poster, several stills, and Lord knows what else. I’ve never laid my hands on one. The film also comes as part of three different multipacks, including The Warner Classics Mega-Collection ($2000, gulp!). My choice is The Alfred Hitchcock Signature Collection ($75), which also includes eight other of Hitchcock’s best films from 1940-1954: Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, The Wrong Man, Stage Fright, I Confess, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Each month, when I go through the possible candidates for "Collector’s Corner," I have a ritual. I go back and check to see how long it’s been since I last wrote about a Hitchcock film. I try to limit myself to one per year. He’s hard to resist -- of his 60-odd films, 22 are perfect candidates for this column. And as much as I am devoted to Ford and Hawks and Chaplin and Lubitsch and Sturges and Wilder and a dozen others, none of them made half so many classics.

There will never be another Hitchcock.

...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com

*The conversations between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut are from Truffaut’s Hitchcock (1967, revised 1985), a series of conversations between the two directors that is well worth reading by anyone interested in Hitchcock.

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