A hawk from a handsaw: “North by Northwest” (1959)

By Scott Ross

Personal Note: (And yes, I realize that criticism itself is a personal response to creative work; however, this is personal in an entirely different manner.) Although I no longer use any form of social media, a friend who recently attempted to copy the URL for one of my posts here to his Facebook page was blocked from doing so. It seems I am, or have been, somehow, “abusive”… whatever the fuck that means.

I don’t know why Zuckerberg’s bots believe my writing is “abusive.” I can only assume some piece of mine which my friend previously re-posted to his page was reported by one of those little pissants who cry for Mommy every time they go online. (Is that “abusive” enough for you?) In our current, reactionary cancel-culture and mass delusional psychosis it’s your own guess how, or whom, you have offended.

Whoever it was, I hope I live to offend him or her as often as possible.

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Hamlet: I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is
Southerly I know a hawk from a hand-saw.
— Hamlet. Act II, scene ii

North by Northwest was the second Alfred Hitchcock picture I ever saw,* via a Sunday afternoon movie broadcast on a local television station in, I think, the summer of 1976, and at a vulnerable age for a budding movie aficionado it gave me a false impression of the director’s work. That the picture was considered “quintessential Hitchcock” by people then writing about classic movies further clouded the issue; it took me years, and many additional Hitchcocks, to recognize that North by Northwest is unique among the filmmaker’s American pictures. If it is in any way quintessential, it’s the quintessence of his British movies.

A variation on the “wrong man” theme the director had been exploring since The Lodger in 1924, it is also in some ways nearly a remake of The 39 Steps, particularly in Hitchcock’s lifting of the aeroplane sequence from John Buchan’s novel, not included in his earlier adaptation. While the filmmaker alternated between light thriller entertainments and darker, more dramatic pictures, it was for playful mystery/suspense entries such as the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, 39 Steps, Secret Agent and The Lady Vanishes that Hitchcock was best known, at least before he emigrated to America. These sparkling comedic melodramas were what most moviegoers, both in Britain and America, thought of when they heard the name Alfred Hitchcock, and it was those older pictures toward which he seemed to be nodding when he and his scenarist, Ernest Lehman, came up with the idea for North by Northwest.

Hitchcock’s American movies by contrast tended with obvious exceptions to be heavier, and more concerned with ostentatious feats of technical and photographic wizardry, both directly before North by Northwest and after it. This lush, VistaVision truffle about a Madison Avenue advertising man mistakenly drawn into the world of espionage is more akin to Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and The Trouble with Harry in the lightness of its touch than it is to heavier items like Rebecca, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, The Wrong Man and Vertigo. It isn’t that the more comic Hitchcock features are unconcerned with style or technique; they simply draw less attention to themselves, and to the man behind the camera. As Eliot M. Camarena succinctly notes, “While I enjoy most of his work overall, I cannot reconcile those flashier moments of his with the man who told François Truffaut that a good film director ‘must never let the brushstrokes show.’ When people say, ‘That’s a great shot,’ they are saying the director yanked them out of the movie and into ‘look-a-me!’ territory.” Sometimes, at his self-indulgent worst, all Hitchcock seems capable of is showing off his brushstrokes.

Hitchcock is at his most interesting, and entertaining, when his movies concentrate their narratives on human beings in conflict with themselves and each other, even in a comic context — not when he is executing elaborate camera dollies or attempting to achieve with bravura technique what he was best at capturing through more subtle effects. Rear Window, for example, was as carefully planned, and as technically proficient, as Psycho or Vertigo or The Birds, yet its effects don’t overwhelm you. (Well, other than that helicopter at the beginning, an obvious process job that detracts from the opening montage in which Hitchcock introduces us to James Stewart’s neighbors.) The audience’s emotions are controlled with great craft and wit and incision, and by writing (John Michael Hayes) and performance (Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Wendell Corey, Raymond Burr) as much as by directorial technique. You never resent what Hitchcock is doing in a movie like this or feel — to use an almost Gelbartian mixed metaphor — you’re having dazzlement shoved down your throat. It’s all of a piece, smoothly stage-managed and drolly observed, the tension slowly ratcheted up nearly to the breaking point, without recourse to showiness. That, not cameras dollying in from great heights to focus on a key in an actress’s hand, or a performer unconvincingly falling backwards down a back-projected staircase, is the true essence of Alfred Hitchcock.

The insistence by this director on flagrant technique often suggests to me less a sense of filmmaking panache than an essential uncertainty about how to approach his material, particularly when, as is well known, he found the pleasure of moviemaking only in the preparation: Once the actual shooting began, the picture was dead to him. His fussiness with storyboards was the opposite of liberating. No wonder Orson Welles, at least in private, was so dismissive of Hitchcock’s ham-handedness; for a man like Welles, the fun of a movie was in its making, and its editing, not its planning. Alas, it is Hitch the Show-off the cineastes swoon over when the content of his pictures is what should (and, in his best movies, does) most engage, and compel, us. After that television showing of North by Northwest in my mid-teens, I spent nearly a decade fruitlessly trying to discover its like among Hitchcock’s American movies. Only after museum and art-house screenings of Foreign Correspondent, The Lady Vanishes and The Man Who Knew Too Much were supplemented by the reissue to theaters of Rear Window did I at last understand what the phrase “quintessential Hitchcock” really meant.

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Rear Window was also, like North by Northwest, essentially a comedy, even if it does concern a possible domestic murder (and the disposal of the body through dismemberment)… as well, later, as the killing of a small dog and two attempted homicides. There’s a killing in North by Northwest as well, which gets neatly pinned on Cary Grant’s ad executive and precipitates his cross-country escape run. The U.N. delegate’s knifing death isn’t funny, of course. Indeed, he’s the movie’s tragic figure in that he is the ultimate victim of the mistaken identity “MacGuffin” that sets the plot in motion and puts Grant on the run. His only crime is talking to the wrong man at the wrong time.‡

Although the position Roger Thornhill, the Grant character, finds himself is essentially comic, and all the more so for the mysterious occurrences happening to the premier light comedian of the 20th century, his imminent death hovers over the action from beginning to end. What makes it more insidiously disturbing is the way the intelligence agency behind the nonexistent agent for whom Grant is mistaken is so cavalier about an innocent man’s fate. Responding to my earlier comments on the blatant distrust of the American government Hitchcock and Ben Hecht expressed in Notorious and which I felt was “obvious, astounding for the period, and wiser than either knew,” Eliot Camarena commented: “We see the same thing in North By Northwest, when Leo G. Carroll’s murderously callous and indifferent spy-master has no adequate reply to Thornhill’s telling him how vile the government’s tactics are. And Thornhill is merely upset about the treatment of Eve Kendall [Eva Marie Saint] — he doesn’t know that the ‘committee’ accepts, because it serves their purpose, that Thornhill himself will likely get killed. Thanks, government…” Indeed, they sit around a corporate-style conference table, speculating, with complete indifference, on what will probably happen to Thornhill; they might as well be discussing the number of fleas on a lab rat’s backside. As with Notorious, which looks so askance at the early CIA, I wonder whether Hitchcock knew, was just guessing, or correctly assumed that all governments look upon their citizens as eminently expendable cogs in the big, dehumanizing machine?

Whatever its undercurrents, North by Northwest is really about entertaining an audience: Setting its expectations spinning, honoring its collective intelligence (a less risible concept in 1959 than it is in 2022) and allowing it to enjoy one of its favorite movie stars cavorting across half the continent with a yielding but unreadable feminine ally and a suave, formidable antagonist dogging his heels — the sort of thing which was once a staple of American moviegoing but for which today’s creators have neither the knack nor the inclination. Indeed, one uneasily anticipates the day Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese “remakes” North by Northwest as a brooding thriller with nasty shock effects liberally sprinkled throughout the running-time.

Someone did remake North by Northwest once, in the late ’70s. His name was Colin Higgins, and in palmier days he wrote Harold and Maude as his master’s thesis. One of those facile creatures who after a striking debut maintain a steady paycheck producing hit nonentities (Foul Play, 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) that please a lot of people and are then almost entirely forgotten, Higgins re-imagined North by Northwest as a comedy with violent kinks, with Gene Wilder the innocent man, Jill Clayburgh in the Saint role and the redoubtable Patrick McGoohan substituting for James Mason, but with bristling nastiness and gratuitous racism in place of wit and soft menace. What was memorable about Silver Streak were Henry Mancini’s engine-like main theme, the running gag of Wilder being thrown from the train and his hilariously incredulous response to it (“Son of a bitch!“), Richard Pryor as Wilder’s acquired sidekick, and the shoe-polish disguise he improvises for his new compatriot, which despite making the white man the butt of the joke will undoubtedly be condemned in an academic journal by some humorless (Caucasian) Gen-Z grad student the minute he finds out about it.

_{Silver Streak: Gene Wilder shucking and jiving. Richard Pryor looks appropriately dubious.}

None of which have anything to do with North by Northwest, except that the “passing” gag almost seems to have been Higgins’ comic rebuke to Cary Grant pretending to be a Redcap on the 20th Century to get safely off a train surrounded by FBI men searching for him. There is even a follow-up to this, in which the Federal agents accost the movie’s actual Pullman Porters, thinking each might be Grant. All these men are revealed, in contradiction to the reality of the time, to be white. Surely Hitchcock and Lehman were aware that the Pullman Porters were black, and that they were an elite group in American labor of the time, employment for a lucky few seen as membership in an exclusive, and remunerative, ethnic fellowship?§ Now, of course, the very word “porter,” whose provenance stretches back centuries, is considered “somewhat derogatory,” and the proud Pullman Porters themselves have been recast as victims, figures of pity only slightly above the status of plantation slaves. Thus do ignoramuses rewrite history.

_{North by Northwest: Note that the only black faces in the crowd are the travelers in the station. All of the Redcaps, ludicrously, are white.}

One suspects the director and his scenarist couldn’t think of any way out of the problem they’d set up for themselves other than having Grant black up, which they were not about to do. Still, when one considers the Pullman history, the scene in Chicago is unfortunate. The train going into a tunnel as Grant and Saint consummate their marriage isn’t an error, of course, but it is a mistake — an example of the way Hitchcock so often thought he was being au courant about sex, all Freudian and naughty, when the jokes were merely adolescent and passé. Did he seriously believe no one had ever thought of that one before? Why not a hot dog going through a donut hole while he was at it? Far wittier is his (and we must assume the jest was Hitchcock’s, not Lehman’s) giving Grant’s Roger Thornhill the monogram “R.O.T.” on his custom matchbooks. When Eve Kendall asks him what the “O” stands for he replies, “Nothing.” This isn’t merely clever; it’s a sly in-joke, the barb aimed at Hitchcock’s former employer, David Selznick, who added the “O” to his name for “for flourish.” Roger is fully aware of what a rotter he is; that matchbook is simultaneously a boast, a jest and a shamefaced admission.

I may seem by dwelling on the flaws of this movie to be pillorying Hitchcock instead of praising him for the American picture of his I most enjoy. But since there are very few such mistakes or miscalculations in North by Northwest, those that do exist stand out all the more. Aside from the demonstrably phony forest in which Grant and Saint share their formal goodbyes prior to the climax, the only other obvious flaw in the second half of the picture is the young boy putting his fingers in his ears just before Saint fires her gun at Grant in the Mt. Rushmore café. You really can’t blame the kid; he’d doubtless been through at least one rehearsal with sound, and children’s hearing is far more acute than that of adults. In an enclosed space, those blanks going off were probably louder than fireworks. Still, it’s one of those unaccountable flubs you can’t quite fathom no one spotted during the filming. Isn’t that the sort of thing they pay script supervisors for?

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_{Eva Marie Saint and James Mason with the VistaVision camera.}

One of Hitchcock’s canniest moves on North by Northwest was insisting that MGM, which produced it, allow his cinematographer Robert Burks to shoot the picture in VistaVision, the Paramount widescreen process. I’ve been a Panavision maven since my adolescence, but when you see a good print of a VistaVision movie projected in a theater you understand why so many filmmakers of the period preferred it to wider screen processes like CinemaScope. VistaVision’s aspect ratio is not as wide as 70mm but it’s taller, giving enormous depth and a unique sharpness to its visual field. (Once fine-grain film was perfected, VistaVision was no longer deemed necessary and largely disappeared, a development I lament.) Hitchcock had already employed it to beautiful effect on To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, his color remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo, and his decision to use it again here was felicitous, especially in his location work. The crop-duster sequence†, for example, might have been effective in standard Academy ratio, and certainly would have been in widescreen CinemaScope; VistaVision, however, fully concentrates the images, making the rural Illinois road neither too small to be effective nor overwhelming the viewer with sheer size. It also seems to have softened the often ineffective and obvious rear-screen process of the time, especially in Grant’s drunken drive and the Mt. Rushmore finale, which is full of matte work, models and miniatures but which looks so good it retains its extreme acrophobic effect even on home-screens.

My adult reservations about Alfred Hitchcock’s excesses to one side, he expressed his exceptional acumen at casting by not only repeatedly employing the two finest movie actors of their time but using them for what was most strikingly unappealing in their personas. To term this “the dark sides of Cary Grant and James Stewart” is trite but not altogether inaccurate; the problem lies in seeing actors limning the less pleasant aspects of their movie roles as a kind of psychotherapeutic role-playing game avant la lettre, or a projection onto the men themselves of the characters they portrayed. For all that both Grant and Stewart were supremely gifted technicians as adept at comedy as at drama (especially Grant) each also excelled at depicting men with unsavory contours. Stewart’s astonishing run of darkness extends from It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946 through his collaborations with Anthony Mann (Winchester ’73, The Naked Spur), Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford) as well as his great work with Hitchcock (Rear Window, Vertigo). I consider the latter title overrated, but not Stewart’s psychotic performance in the leading role, one of the most haunting depictions of obsessive madness in the movies.

Grant by contrast had fewer opportunities than Stewart — the trace of the unknowable in Grant’s performance as Geoff Carter in Only Angels Have Wings is a good example of an early stab, as is C.K. Dexter Haven’s dark glance and eloquent silence in The Philadelphia Story — but his work with Hitchcock alone makes up for the smaller number. Although Suspicion was fatally compromised, Grant was playing the homicidal husband of Joan Fontaine’s fears, and as Devlin in Notorious he takes caddishness to disturbing extremes as the character’s bitterness at the woman he loves for doing what she has been told is her patriotic duty nearly gets her killed. A similar sexual jealousy rears its head in North by Northwest, although it’s far more reasonably motivated: An attempt has been made on the man’s life, seemingly orchestrated by the woman who hid him on the train, and with whom he enjoyed a night of intense kissing (how dare you infer they slept together in that berth!) but who now appears to be the mistress of the man who wants him dead. Wouldn’t you be a trifle miffed? Thornhill doesn’t know, of course, because the men who might have warned him expect him to die, that Eve, like Bergman vis a vis Claude Raines in Notorious, is working for those same intelligence agents, who, as Eliot suggested, are no more concerned for her life than for his. Sometime in the 1970s I began to see North by Northwest cited as a progenitor of the James Bond series. But why? Grant doesn’t work for CIA, and those who do are on the periphery, and are hardly heroic. The chief reasons seems to be that the central figure is witty, and that international espionage is involved. Do people honestly imagine North by Northwest was the first movie to trade on such elements?

Grant’s co-stars work on a level of professionalism as high and as bright as his own: Saint is coolly sophisticated as the woman who at first shields and then betrays Thornhill, only later revealing the depth of her vulnerability; James Mason is silkily menacing as his nemesis, Van Damme; Jessie Royce Landis, although in fact only eight years older than Grant, lends rich comic support as Thornhill’s wry, disbelieving mother; Leo G. Carroll is reassuringly avuncular in a role that might have been inspired by the Satanic Dulles brothers, his grandfatherly mien a patina plastered over a cold-blooded heart; and Martin Landau is intriguingly deviant as Leonard, Mason’s aide de camp, who trusts what he calls his “feminine intuition” and seems to be not merely suspicious of Eve but in love with Van Damme and jealous of his attention to Eve.

Hitchcock’s most important collaborator on North by Northwest was not Burks, or his editor George Tomasini or even Cary Grant but Bernard Herrmann. Although when unbridled Herrmann could be as overbearing and hysterical as Dmitri Tiomkin at his emphatic worst, at his considerable best he was better than almost anyone else. Herrmann’s score, like James Stewart’s performance, makes Vertigo seem greater than it is, and Psycho would be nearly unthinkable without his astonishing “black-and-white” chamber music. For North by Northwest he composed a driving, incandescent fandango which he supplements with ingenious variations throughout the picture; I don’t think action scoring gets any better than Herrmann’s music for the Mt. Rushmore finale of this movie, or the start of Grant’s drunken escape from his would-be killers, where the agitated string work anticipates Psycho. The composer was also wise enough to know that the brilliant crop-duster sequence, its suspense masterfully teased out by Hitchcock’s extending the puzzlingly mundane contours of its prelude — without which the action to follow would have infinitely less impact — could only be diminished with scoring: Herrmann waits until the climax of the scene to re-introduce his theme. That is more than valuable collaboration. It’s virtually co-authorship.

_{Saul Bass’ main title design. The lines and squares will eventually reveal themselves as windows in a steel-and-glass skyscraper.}

Hitchcock, Herrmann and the title designer Saul Bass set the machine in motion before the credits even begin, with the rolling drums introducing that fandango beginning over Leo the Lion’s roar, a green background superimposed over his image. Animated lines appear, moving both upwards and down, to the left, across the screen. Forward motion is what North by Northwest is about; Hitchcock and Lehman barely introduce Grant as Thornhill before whisking him off at gunpoint, and except for Grant’s scenes with Eva Marie Saint, particularly on the train, the picture seldom stops for breath after that opening. (It isn’t by accident that Hitchcock’s cameo involves a bus pulling rapidly away from the curb.) And while at 2 hours and 16 minutes the picture is a bit long for a thriller, the energy never dips; I’ve seen films 30 minutes shorter that felt twice as long. The writer and the director accomplish this by, first, keeping us as well as Thornhill in the dark, put further off-balance by each confusing new incident; then, having revealed all the tangled threads, by raising the ante through subterfuge (Eve shooting Thornhill) and revelation (Leonard figuring out that Eve is a government agent) so that the tension during the final ten minutes is nearly unbearable — especially with those shots, terrifying for an acrophobe, of the pair climbing around on Mt. Rushmore. Seldom, I think, has a thriller had better pace and acceleration. If you aren’t completely won over before the crop-duster sequence, I don’t know what can reach you aside from a bullet in your brainpan.

_{Figures in a landscape: Awaiting the crop-duster.}

And now to that classic central episode I’ve danced around so many times in this essay. Other Hitchcock suspense sequences have received greater acclaim but almost without exception they involve excessive, fussy camera tricks (Vertigo), rapid editing (Psycho) or shock effects (The Birds). He is far better served, and better serves his material, when he teases it out with humor (Grant’s drunken Long Island drive, the runaway car in Family Plot) or slowly tightens the screws (Norman watching as the car stops sinking in Psycho) or when he makes an inoffensive, everyday object the source of mounting terror (the carousel in Strangers on a Train). In the crop-duster sequence, he and Lehman turn a lonely stretch of barren highway into an alien landscape in which anything might happen, although nothing (literally nothing) at first seems to be happening at all, as a man alone waits for a bus that never arrives. The entire sequence reportedly contains 133 editorial cuts, but because it runs nearly ten minutes those edits don’t assault you, the way they do in Psycho and The Birds. The filmmaker has the supreme confidence to hold for long moments on scenes of stasis, and it’s the accumulation of mundane detail, over several minutes, that gives the thing its unique build toward a suspenseful ending, as the crop-duster that is, as a bystander notes, “dusting where there aren’t any crops” goes after Thornhill.

There are so many such great moments in North by Northwest the picture is almost a compendium of the things Hitchcock did well: Thornhill’s comic/scary drunk drive, pursued by murderous thugs; the confrontation with the killers in the crowded hotel elevator; the U.N. knifing; the meeting between Thornhill and Eve in the dining car; the long romantic scene in her stateroom, where the two kissing vertical bodies move with the curves the train makes on its tracks and Grant uses his wrist to steady Saint, allowing her head to roll languidly and sensually along the back of his hand; Saint and Landau seen talking to each other at opposite ends of a row of telephone booths (remember them?); the comic scene at the auction in which Thornhill deftly escapes death by making a public nuisance of himself. And then there’s Grant’s performance, as a man of cavalier attitudes who must finally face his essential self, and who discovers there is more to him than even he thinks. Grant’s Thornhill knows he’s more than a bit of a cad. I suspect it’s what so wounds his pride when Eve seems to have betrayed him; he’s never allowed himself to care much about the women he seduces, and when one goes out of her way to assist him (and accommodate him enthusiastically in other ways) and then sets up his murder, it hits him harder than he may have imaged it could.

_{Roger: We’ll get ’em. We’ll throw the book at ’em. Assault and kidnapping. Assault with a gun and a bourbon and a sports car.}

I don’t mean to suggest that Grant’s performance is all darkness and rue. At 55 he looks spectacular and moves with the same grace and athleticism he had 20 years earlier; the comic is never far from Grant’s side, or from Hitchcock’s. Lehman’s script is the wittiest the director ever got (in his American pictures, anyway) and Grant is abler than any actor of his generation with a comedic line, or scene. When Thornhill is arrested for drunk driving, for example, Grant keeps curling up on benches and tables, exasperating his arresting officer. But he also never forgets that he has been victimized and wants the cops to do something about it. To the police it’s just another inebriate babbling. To us, who know better, it’s nothing but, as they say in Courtland, the truth. Or take the auction scene where, to attract attention and (he hopes) slip the trap his would-be killers have sprung by getting himself arrested. Grant’s timing, his demeanor and his deliberate obnoxiousness perfectly illustrate how adaptable Roger Thornhill, the placid man in the gray flannel suit, has become. As he’s taken away a well-heeled matron sniffs that Thornhill, who has been ostentatiously insulting about the provenance of the antiquities to be auctioned, is “a genuine idiot.” But we know, as Hamlet did, that to be but mad north-northwest is sometimes the sanest act of all.

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*For many years I thought North by Northwest was the first but recently remembered that was a library screening of the 1935 The 39 Steps when I was 12 or 13. Bless those sainted librarians of my pubescent and early adolescent years, who in addition to The 39 Steps introduced me, through weekday evening and Sunday afternoon screenings at various venues, to the Olivier Hamlet, to such glories as The Maltese Falcon and even to amiable trash like High Society and the Charlie Chan programmer Meeting at Midnight. These events mattered to me, at a time when movie-love was beginning to grip me like a fever. What are their equivalents today? Would any self-respecting librarian now dare to screen a black-and-white movie for any audience under the collective age of 60?

†My father’s “kid brother” (as Dad always called him) and his family happened to be visiting us on my first exposure to North by Northwest and I well remember Uncle John sticking his head into the living room, asking what I was watching, looking for a moment at the screen of our black-and-white Zenith television console and asking me if the crop-dusting scene had happened yet. It was one of the most enticing remarks I ever heard about a movie I hadn’t seen before.

‡We’ll leave aside for the moment what the true purpose of the U.N. is. I don’t pretend to offer definitive proof one way or the other of sinister intent, although I suspect we’re living through a manifestation of it. I will simply note that in 1959, when North by Northwest was new, the institution was largely considered benign except by the easily dismissed wingnuts of the time… some of whom seem a lot less wacky today.

§Thanks, again, to Eliot M. Camarena for educating me on Pullman history.

Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross