North by Northwest

North by Northwest
Image:Northbynorthwest1.jpg Original film poster
Directed by	Alfred Hitchcock
Produced by	Associate producer: Herbert Coleman Uncredited: Alfred Hitchcock
Written by	Ernest Lehman
Starring	Cary Grant Eva Marie Saint James Mason Jessie Royce Landis Martin Landau Leo G. Carroll
Music by	Bernard Herrmann
Cinematography	Robert Burks
Editing by	George Tomasini
Distributed by	Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Release date(s)	July 28, 1959
Running time	136 min.
Language	English
Budget	US$ 4,000,000
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North by Northwest (1959) is a comic thriller by Alfred Hitchcock produced at MGM and generally considered one of his best works. It is a tale of mistaken identity, with an innocent man pursued across America by agents of a mysterious organization who want to stop his interference in their plans to smuggle out some microfilm (the McGuffin).

The film stars Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll, and Martin Landau. The screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures"[1]. It is one of several Hitchcock movies with a film score by Bernard Herrmann. The film also features a famous title sequence by the graphic designer Saul Bass.

Plot

A Madison Avenue advertising executive, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), is mistaken for a government agent named George Kaplan. He is seized by two enemy agents at New York City’s Plaza Hotel and taken to the house of Lester Townsend. There he is interrogated by a man Thornhill assumes to be Townsend, but who is really Phillip Vandamm (James Mason). Vandamm becomes frustrated when Thornhill repeatedly denies he is Kaplan and orders his agents to get rid of him.

They force a large quantity of bourbon down Thornhill's throat and put him in a stolen car, intending to stage a fatal accident. He breaks free and, after an exciting chase on a perilous road through the dark on Long Island, is rear-ended by a police car. Thornhill is apprehended and charged with drunk driving. He tries to convince the police, the judge, and his mother (Jessie Royce Landis) that he was kidnapped and forced to drink the liquor, but they are all skeptical, especially when a woman posing as Townsend's wife informs them that Townsend is a United Nations diplomat.

Realising that the only way to prove the truth of his far-fetched story is to locate George Kaplan, Thornhill visits Kaplan’s hotel room, where he finds a photograph of the man he believes is Townsend.

Narrowly escaping capture, Thornhill catches a taxi to the General Assembly building of the United Nations, where Townsend is due to deliver a speech. When he meets him, Thornhill is surprised to find that he is not the man who interrogated him. At that moment, one of Vandamm’s accomplices throws a knife that strikes Townsend in the back. He falls forward, dead, into Thornhill’s arms. Unthinkingly, Thornhill removes the knife, making it appear that he is the killer. A passing photographer captures the scene, forcing him to flee.

Still in pursuit of Kaplan, Thornhill needs to get to Chicago since Kaplan has now checked out of the Plaza and his itinerary indicates he has a reservation in a Chicago hotel the next day. Seeing a train as the best means of being able to travel unobtrusively despite the manhunt searching for him, Thornhill goes to Grand Central Station and sneaks onto a 20th Century Limited train going to Chicago. On board, he meets the blond Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who helps Thornhill evade policemen searching the train by hiding him twice: once in the overhead, fold-up bunk in her compartment. During a conversation, she asks about his personalized matchbooks with the initials ROT; he says the O stands for "nothing".

Arriving at Chicago, Thornhill borrows the uniform of one of the porters, and carries Eve’s luggage through the crowd. Although the police are alerted to his disguise, the sheer number of porters allows Thornhill to elude them. Meanwhile, Eve (who is Vandamm's lover) meets with one of Vandamm’s henchmen, and lies to Thornhill about arranging a meeting with George Kaplan.

In an iconic scene, Thornhill travels by bus to meet Kaplan at a remote crossroads in the middle of a perfectly flat, open countryside. The only other person in sight is a man who is dropped off by a car and waits at the bus stop. Before boarding the next bus and leaving Thornhill alone, he observes that a crop duster is "dusting crops where there ain't no crops." Without warning, the plane flies towards Thornhill and starts shooting at him. He dives for cover, is chased through a cornfield and dusted with pesticide. Finally, Thornhill flags down a gasoline tanker, which stops barely in time. The plane then crashes into it, triggering a large explosion. Taking advantage of rubberneckers stopping, Thornhill steals a pickup truck and returns to Chicago.

Thornhill goes to the Ambassador Hotel, where he believes George Kaplan is staying. He is surprised when he is told that Kaplan checked out earlier that day (before Eve claimed to have spoken to him), leaving a forwarding address in Rapid City, South Dakota. Doubting her honesty, Thornhill visits Eve in her room and is asked to stay away. He removes his suit for cleaning and ironing, and pretends to take a shower as she leaves for a meeting. Using a pencil to reveal the indentations on a notepad, Thornhill learns her destination and follows her to an art auction.

At the auction, Thornhill once more comes face to face with Vandamm. Vandamm bids for and purchases a pre-Columbian Tarascan statue. He still believes that Thornhill is George Kaplan; indeed, he accuses Thornhill of overacting the role of the innocent bystander. After being threatened once more, Thornhill tries to leave, only to find all exits covered by Vandamm’s men. To avoid capture, he deliberately makes a scene, placing nonsensical bids, so the police will be called to remove him. To make sure that he stays safely in custody, Thornhill identifies himself as the UN killer, but as they drive to the police station, the officers are ordered to take him to Chicago Midway International Airport (where a gate for Northwest Airlines is seen, playing on the movie's title).

Thornhill meets the Professor (Leo G. Carroll), a spymaster who is trying to stop Vandamm from smuggling microfilmed secrets out of the country. The Professor reveals that George Kaplan is imaginary, a fiction created to distract Vandamm from the real government agent—Eve, whose life is now in danger because of Thornhill's interference. In order to protect her, Thornhill agrees to help the Professor and his agency fool Vandamm.

At the cafeteria at the base of Mount Rushmore, Thornhill (now pretending to be George Kaplan) meets with Eve and Vandamm. He offers to allow Vandamm to leave the country unhindered in exchange for Eve. The deal is refused. In a staged struggle, Eve shoots Thornhill and flees. Vandamm and his henchman quickly depart, as the apparently critically wounded Thornhill is taken away by stretcher in a station wagon, accompanied by the Professor. The makeshift ambulance is driven to a secluded spot; Thornhill emerges unharmed to speak with Eve privately. He becomes highly agitated when he learns that she is using the "shooting" to get Vandamm to take her with him, so that she can gather further intelligence. The "park ranger" driver then knocks Thornhill unconscious with a punch. When he wakes up, he finds himself locked in a hospital room under guard to prevent his further meddling. He talks the Professor into getting a bottle of bourbon, changes his clothes, and escapes out a window.

Thornhill arrives at Vandamm’s mountainside home. He scales the outside of the building and slips inside undetected. He watches as Leonard (Martin Landau) convinces his boss Vandamm that the shooting he witnessed was faked by firing the gun (filled with blanks) at him. Vandamm decides to throw Eve out of the plane once they are airborne. Thornhill manages to warn her by writing a note inside one of his ROT matchbooks and dropping it where she will see it.

Just before she is to board the plane, Eve escapes with the microfilm, which is hidden in the pre-Columbian statue purchased by Vandamm at the auction, and joins Thornhill. (He was supposed to create a diversion to help her get away, but was held up by the housekeeper armed, he finally realizes, with the gun with the blanks.) They are chased across the Presidential faces on Mount Rushmore. When Eve slips and clings desperately to the mountainside. Thornhill reaches down and grabs one of her hands, while precariously steadying himself with his other hand. Above them, a gloating Leonard arrives and begins grinding his shoe on Thornhill's hand. They are saved from a fatal fall by the timely arrival of the Professor and a police marksman, who shoots Leonard.

Thornhill pulls Eve to safety and the film smoothly cuts to him pulling her into an overhead train bunk, where they are spending their honeymoon. The final scene shows their train speeding into a tunnel.

Origins

John Russell Taylor's official biography of Hitchcock, Hitch (1978), suggests that the story originated after a spell of writer's block during the scripting of another movie 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 Herrman 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 most of Hitchcock's ideas were no good. It was true that Lehman created the crop duster scene. 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.

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 Ortis C. Guernsey, a respected reporter who was inspired by a true story during World War II when a couple of British secretaries created a fictitious agent and watched as the Germans wasted time following him around. Guernsey turned his idea into a story about an American travelling 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" 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 John Michael Hayes — Alfred Hitchcock collaboration. When Lehman came onboard, the travelling salesman — which had previously been suited to James Stewart — was adapted to a Madison Avenue advertising executive, a position which Lehman had formerly held. It has also been speculated that Hitchcock felt Stewart was too old and this had hurt their previous collaboration Vertigo, but in fact Hitchcock had planned to reunite with Stewart on his next film "The Blind Man".

Analysis

Alfred Hitchcock planned the film as a change of pace after his dark romantic thriller Vertigo a year earlier. In an interview with François Truffaut ("Hitchcock / Truffaut"), Hitchcock said that he wanted to do something fun, light-hearted, and generally free of the symbolism permeating his other movies. Hitchcock, however, was not above inserting a Freudian joke as the last shot (which, notably, made it past contemporary censors). Despite its frothy appearance, the movie carries a number of underlying themes, the most important being the themes of theater and play-acting, wherein everyone is playing a part; no one is who they seem; and identity is in flux. This is reflected by Thornhill's line: "The only performance that will satisfy you is when I play dead."

Grant was distressed with the way the plot seemed to wander aimlessly, and he actually approached Hitchcock to complain about the script. "I can't make heads or tails of it," he said, without realizing that he was quoting the very words he would speak when playing the role of Thornhill. The title North by Northwest refers to a line from Hamlet, a play about illusion and reality, thereby adding to the fantasy of the film, as Hitchcock noted in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in 1963, and was also a pun on the Northwest Airlines reference in the film.

The plot of this film is one of the purer versions of Alfred Hitchcock's idea of the "MacGuffin", the thing that everyone in the movie is going for, but in reality could be anything at all and which serves no real purpose. In North by Northwest, the spies are attempting to smuggle microfilm containing government secrets out of the country and try to kill Thornhill, who they believe is the fictitious agent George Kaplan on their trail.

There are similarities between this movie and Hitchcock's earlier film Saboteur (1942), whose final scene on top of the Statue of Liberty foreshadows the Mount Rushmore scene in the later film. In fact, North by Northwest can be seen as the last and best in a long line of "wrong man" films that Hitchcock made according to the pattern he established in The 39 Steps (1935).

Awards

North by Northwest was nominated for three Academy Awards for Film Editing (George Tomasini), Art Direction, and Original Screenplay (Ernest Lehman). The film also won, for Lehman, a 1960 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. It is #40 on the American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Movies, #4 on its 100 Years, 100 Thrills, and is consistently in the top 25 on the Internet Movie Database's Top 250. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

North by Northwest in popular culture

North By Northwest has been referenced and parodied in many works, mostly for the cropduster scene.

• The Simpsons parodied the scene in three episodes (one with a young Marge Simpson, one with Elton John and another with Dr. Hibbert pursuing Bart Simpson).
• The Family Guy episode North by North Quahog almost completely parodies the movie, hence the title. It includes the cropduster scene, as well as the climactic chase scene on Mount Rushmore. The mountainside house at the end of the actual movie was also featured, and is an exact facsimile, with the same decorations and geographic layout.
• A direct reference is made in Arizona Dream by Emir Kusturica, where one of main characters is obsessed with playing the crop duster scene.
• Perhaps the most famous take-off on this scene is a recreation of it in the James Bond film From Russia With Love, in which Bond is chased through a field by a small helicopter which acts as a variation on the crop duster.
• The crop scene was parodied in the Halloween episode of That '70s Show third season, where Michael Kelso is being attacked by a remote-controlled model airplane.
• On the Scrubs episode, "My Unicorn", J.D. is chased by a remote controlled airplane, which then crashes, resulting in a large explosion behind a hill, which causes J.D. to remark on the unusual size of the explosion.
• Two sections of dialogue between Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant on board the train were used by UK train operator Virgin Trains in their 2005 commercial "The Return of the Train". The short film shows scenes set onboard trains from various movies including North by Northwest, Some Like it Hot and Murder on the Orient Express with the actors transposed to the setting of a modern Virgin Pendolino express train.
• In Wu Ming's novel 54, Cary Grant is sent by MI6 on a secret diplomatic mission in Yugoslavia. He travels under a false name: George Kaplan.
• Anthony Horowitz, the author of the Alex Rider Adventures, wrote a book called South By Southeast. It is believed to be a parody of this movie, as there are several cases of mistaken identity and a character named McGuffin. It is a comedy in the Diamond Brothers Mysteries series.
• The striking Saul Bass title sequence, featuring angled words sliding up and down the sides of Madison Avenue office buildings, remains so memorable that in 2006 it is the inspiration for the design of all upcoming-programming interstitials on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel.
• In The 1994 movie Richie Rich a security guard is watching North by Northwest on one of the monitors; also it is parodied by Mr. Rich, Mrs. Rich, and Richie as they are chased on top of their personal version of a Mt. Rushmore setup as in North by Northwest.
• In the movie Lucky Number Slevin Ben Kingsley explains the plot to Josh Hartnett and told a story about how his immigrant father referred to Eva Marie Saint as a "buick" because he could not say "beauty" causing confusion.
• It is possible that the backstory of the character Brad Carlton of the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless is a reference to North by Northwest, as the character's real name is George Kaplan — he has pretended to be Brad Carlton for years.

Production

The cropduster sequence, supposedly set in northern Indiana, was actually shot on location near the towns of Wasco and Delano, north of Bakersfield in Kern County, California.

At the time, the United Nations prohibited film crews from shooting around its New York City headquarters. In an example of guerrilla filmmaking, Hitchcock used a movie camera hidden in a parked van to film Cary Grant and Adam Williams exiting their taxis and entering the building.

The house at the end of the movie 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. The set was built in Culver City, where MGM was located.

Cast

• Cary Grant as Roger O. Thornhill. James Stewart was the original choice to play Thornhill, but Hitchcock replaced him with Grant after the poor box office performance of Vertigo, which Hitchock blamed on Stewart looking too old to still attract audiences. In reality, Grant was four years older than Stewart.
• Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall.
• James Mason as Phillip Vandamm.
• Leo G. Carroll as The Professor.
• Jessie Royce Landis as Clara Thornhill. Landis, who played Thornhill's mother, was only eight years older than Grant. She also played his future mother-in-law in To Catch a Thief.
• Martin Landau as Leonard.
• Philip Ober as Lester Townsend.
• Josephine Hutchinson as Mrs. Townsend.
• Adam Williams as Valerian.

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In North by Northwest he can be seen missing a bus, two minutes into the film.

Trivia

• When Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant escape with the microfilm-filled statue near the end of the film, Grant says "I see you've got the pumpkin". This is a reference to the Soviet espionage case of several years earlier involving the diplomat Alger Hiss. The journalist Whittaker Chambers had hidden a microfilm of government secrets in a pumpkin on his farm. Hiss had given the microfilm to Chambers in the 1930s, when they were both working as Soviet spies.
• When Grant, waiting in Eve's hotel room in Chicago for his dusty suit to be sponged and pressed, pretends to take a shower, he whistles the theme song from the 1952 movie Singin' in the Rain. Both films are of course MGM productions, and the song has long been regarded as the unofficial studio theme song.
• Eva Marie Saint's line was redubbed during the dining car seduction scene. 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". It is said that the censors felt the original line was too risque for the time.
• North by Northwest was originally titled "The Man on Lincoln's Nose."
• This film is the only one directed by Alfred Hitchcock that was released by MGM. However, it is now owned by Turner Entertainment -- since 1996 a division of Warner Bros. -- which owns the pre-1986 MGM library.
• The stretch of road where the famous Cropduster scene is set is the same stretch where actor James Dean died in an automobile accident.
• During the restaurant scene at Mount Rushmore, just before Eve draws her gun on Roger, a child in the background is seen covering his ears and ready for the coming shots even though she hasn't fired yet.

References

• McLendon, Sandy. Modernism at the Movies: The Vandamm House in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" at Jetsetmodern.com

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