North by Northwest Now Seems Campy

 

NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

MGM, Technicolor, 136 minutes, Not-rated

★★★

 

 

 

North by Northwest is considered such a great film that it has been preserved by the National Film Registry. I hadn’t seen it in decades so I decided to see how it holds up. Let’s just say it made more sense in 1959.

 

Hitchcock was definitely being playful in North by Northwest, beginning with the title. Many have pondered its meaning, but Hitchcock insisted that it was just a “fantasy” handle that didn’t mean anything in particular. What’s more obvious is that it is a Cold War film that has been called the “first James Bond film.” If you know nothing else about it, you probably know of its most famous scene in which beleaguered Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is running for his life from a machine gun-blasting crop duster in a barren section of Nebraska that’s flatter than a five-day glass on Coke left on the counter. That clip actually did inspire a scene in a Bond film, a helicopter chase in From Russia with Love (1963).

 

Thornhill is a twice-divorced New York advertising man whose gray suit identifies him as an other-directed interchangeable business cog like those incisively dissected in Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Thornhill’s life is about to become more exciting. Waiters at a New York City bar page “George Kaplan” and several heavies conclude that Thornhill is he. Roger is kidnapped at gunpoint and spirited away to a fancy estate belonging to Lester Townshend. No one wants to hear that he’s not Kaplan; they just want him to die in an “accident.” Thornhill is forced to drink an entire bottle of bourbon, placed behind the wheel of a stolen car, and set loose on a winding cliffside road. Against all odds, Townshend survives, is picked up for DUI, and is bailed out the next morning by his disapproving mother (Jessie Royce Landis).

 

Needless to say, no one is buying his kidnapping story. Roger learns that Townshend is a UN official and that he’s being followed by the same team of baddies who kidnapped him. (One is Martin Landau who later starred in the TV spy series Mission: Impossible.) Thornhill meets Townshend at the UN just in time for one of the thugs to fire a knife into Townshend’s back. Great! Now Thornhill really has to flee as photographers snapped him pulling said knife out the dead man’s back. His only way out is to find Kaplan, whom he has reason to believe is in Chicago, and his best chance of getting there is to sneak aboard the 20^th Century Limited. There he meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who almost instantly seduces him and agrees to help him. What ensues is a chase across three states, the discovery that Kaplan doesn’t exist, a triple cross, a subplot involving foreign agents and microfilm, and flight down the face of Mount Rushmore.

 

A lot of this seemed much more plausible during the frostiest days of the Cold War. From today's perspective, the most cinematic features of the film are the cinematography of Robert Burks and Bernard Hermann’s dramatic musical score. There are numerous comedic touches in the film that suggest Hitchcock intended a Spy vs. Spy* spoof on Cold War skullduggery. In other words, North by Northwest now seems campy. One of its greatest pleasures these days is finding all the plot holes.

 

There are many and I will point out just one. New York’s Finest can’t find Thornhill in Grand Central Station, even though a ticket agent has told them he’s there, his picture is in every newspaper in the city, and he’s wearing the same suit since he was picked up for DUI. In fact, he wears that MacGuffin through the entire movie. Wouldn’t you think at some point someone would say, “It’s the guy in the gray suit with the unusual accent who looks just like Cary Grant.” You also have to love the irony of another British-born sophisticate, James Mason, playing the main bad guy, and a third, Leo G. Carroll as a part of the U.S. spy team. Like Landau, Carroll parlayed his movie role into a TV spy series; he headed the white-hatted counter-espionage agency in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  

 

You really can entertain yourself mightily by counting enough plot holes to make a fishing net. Hitchcock was usually a master at hiding them but to go back to being playful, he didn’t make much effort to disguise them in North by Northwest. He didn’t even take care to hide himself. (Hitchcock always placed himself in a walk-on somewhere in his films. In this one he’s like Waldo standing alone in a snowy field.) To top it off, the final shot of the movie is Sigmund Freud with a sledgehammer. When you see it, you’ll know what I mean.

 

A classic film? Not anymore, but camp is fun.

 

Rob Weir   

 

* If this reference eludes you, it was an ongoing Mad Magazine cartoon that satirized Cold War espionage.