North by Northwest
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North by Northwest
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1995.
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North by Northwest is a 1959 American spy thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason. The screenplay was by Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures".
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 microfilm, which contains government secrets, out of the country. This is one of several Hitchcock films that feature a music score by Bernard Herrmann and an opening title sequence by graphic designer Saul Bass, and was the first to feature extended use of kinetic typography in its opening credits.
Why It Rocks
- Hitchcock crafting a light-hearted film involving a wronged man trying to clear his name is a common trope in his works (i.e.: The 39 Steps (1935) and Saboteur.) In this film, advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill, is exposed to a world of spies involving crop-dusters, national monuments, pine forests, high-end auctions, and urbane killers. In the process, he also sheds his narcissism and matures into someone capable of love.
- Plus, the film deepens the story of the man on the run by giving the hero more of a history than the heroes of some of Hitchcock's previous "wrongly accused man" films.
- For this film, the content was secondary to the handing for Hitchcock, and effects he could produce on audience rather than the subject mattered. He created a sequence at Mount Rushmore and worked backwards from there, to find a plot that could tie them together.
- The film's really about a handful of encounters, some apparently dead-end plot twists, and Hitchcock’s mastery of the full arsenal of studio resources and trickery.
- Another addition that sets the film apart from most of Hitchcock’s thrillers, is the elements of absurdity, from Thornhill’s phone call to his mother (in which Grant delivers a perfect Dean Martin imitation) after the police pick him up for drunk driving to the moment when Thornhill and his mother come face to face with Vandamm’s assassins in a crowded elevator and Mrs. Thornhill asks, “You gentlemen aren’t really trying to kill my son, are you?” to the moment when press photographers just happen to be on hand to snap pictures of Thornhill holding up the knife he has just plucked from the body of Lester Townsend, murdered before his eyes inside the United Nations. All this led to the film becoming a skilled melding of espionage, comedy, and romance.
- Creative opening title design by Saul Bass, innovative for its use of credits in motion.
- Phenomenal score by Bernard Herrmann (his fifth for Hitchcock).
- This film would serve as a template various action movies, aside from the James Bond movies that would follow only three years later --starting with Dr. No in 1962-- it also influenced Mission: Impossible, Jason Bourne, and the Fast and the Furious films.
- Smart and meaningful casting choices for the characters.
- Cary Grant was cast in the lead role because the actor allowed audiences to identify with the main character, due to Cary Grant representing a man people know.
- Eve Marie Saint, was the latest in Hitchcock's long line of icy, independent blondes in his films
- James Mason was selected to play Phillip Vandamm, the main villain, because Hitchcock wanted someone smooth and distinguished.
- Young Martin Landau is memorable as Leonard, a suspicious henchman to Phillip Vandamm
- Despite Phillip Vandamm being suave and charismatic, he still comes across as threatening at the same time, as his character was split into three people: James Mason, who is attractive and suave; his sinister-looking secretary Leonard, and the third spy, who is crude and brutal, “Valerian”.
- The film contains three of Hitchcock's most memorable pieces.
- First off, there's the crop-dusting sequence where Thornhill frantically seeks refuge in an Indiana cornfield, a seven-minute chase without dialogue or music.
- Then there's his escape from the killer awaiting him outside a Chicago auction house by bidding so wild and obstreperous that the auctioneer calls the police to cart him off.
- Finally, there's the climactic sequence in which Vandamm and his henchmen, now aware that Eve is the undercover agent whom George Kaplan was invented to conceal, pursue Eve and Thornhill to the edge of Mount Rushmore, and then down between the faces of the monumental sculptures that stand as the film’s ultimate symbols of the patriarchal authority Thornhill’s adventures keep butting him up against.
- Hitchcock managed to sneak in some naughty double entendres, such as a cheeky, intentionally suggestive closing image of a train entering a tunnel. According to Hitchcock, it was "one of the most impudent shots [he] ever made”.
- One of the best examples of Hitchcock’s subjective visual storytelling is the sequence in which Roger Thornhill sneaks up to Philip Vandamm’s Modernist-style house behind Mount Rushmore. As Thornhill peers through a window to spy on a conversation between Vandamm and Leonard, then creeps up to Eve Kendall’s window to try to warn her, then enters the house and spies from an upstairs landing, Hitchcock continually cuts to Thornhill's point of view, making his reactions our reactions and building tension. Hitchcock in effect is directing the audience, making us active participants in a sequence so visually told that it would still make perfect sense with the sound turned off.
- It should also be noted that the film leaves some of the details government's scheme ambiguous. The closest the viewer gets to an explanation is that the government has invented a false identity to fool foreign agents, and there's a scheme to trap an international something-or-other. (The roar of airplane engines would drown out the Professor when he gets down to specific details.)
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