North by Northwest

Categories: 1959 films | Thriller films | Adventure films | United States National Film Registry | Films directed by Alfred Hitchcock

North by Northwest is a 1959 MGM thriller by Alfred Hitchcock and is generally considered one of his best works. 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 Manhattan advertising man, Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant), is mistaken for a government agent and pursued by spies who want to kill him. Thornhill is framed for murder and forced to elude the police as well as the secret agents. The film has several plot twists and a sly sense of humor, as well as a number of famous scenes, including one in which Grant's character is chased by a crop duster, and another in which Grant and leading lady Eva Marie Saint clamber over the faces of Mount Rushmore in an attempt to evade their enemies.

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 and adaptation of the novel The Wreck of the Mary Deere by Hammond Innes. Composer Bernard Herrman had reccomended 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 U.N. building; 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 cropduster 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 Nazis 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 (in the finished movie, the chase takes place across the top of Mount Rushmore and left the faces well alone). 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, which suited Lehman as he had formerly been one. (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 that 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. In fact, even the title North by Northwest refers to a compass direction that does not exist (the correct term is "North-northwest"), thereby adding to the fantasy of the film, as Hitchcock noted in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in 1963. (The title does make sense in reference to when Thornhill travels north via Northwest Airlines.)

The plot of this film is one of the purer versions of Alfred Hitchcock's idea of the "McGuffin", 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 obviously going after Thornhill for some purpose or object, but it's never made clear. Even after the spies have been thrawted, it's still not made clear what they wanted from Thornhill.

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).

North By Northwest has been referenced and parodied in many works, mostly for the crop duster 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 film is also used as a plot engine in the Family Guy episode "North by North Quahog."

Awards

North by Northwest was nominated for three Academy Awards for Film Editing (George Tomasini), Art Direction, and Original Screenplay (Ernest Lehman). 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.

External links

• North by Northwest at the Internet Movie Database
• Classic Movies: North By Northwest (1959)
• The storyboard of the moviede:Der unsichtbare Dritte

es:Con la muerte en los talones fr:La Mort aux trousses it:Intrigo internazionale ja:北北西に進路を取れ pl:Północ, północny zachód