Cary Grant and America, looking very well

Rating: 8/10 (14 September 2007)

There is none of the depth and gravity of "Notorious" here, but in this case the spy/whore love story is just a device to propel the real show: a Ray-Ban world of blithe sophistication. Cary Grant looks so good in that suit, and the architecture is so slick, and the images are so crystalline, that it's as if Ernest Lehman and Alfred Hitchcock had made a whole script and movie out of a Cadillac layout in Life magazine. Every detail looks designed by Arrow Shirt style engineers, from the monogrammed matchbooks to the immaculate train stations to the Brylcreem haircuts. Comfort food for American eyes - it was never like this, but this is how the Atomic Age dreamed next year would be: blue skies, sharp creases, big tailfins. In a couple of years the freaks were going to shoot Kennedy and start taking acid, but here we have a beatnik-free VistaVision tour of the American panorama as it never was, a moving picture album by Norman Rockwell, with good and evil simplified in living color.
"North by Northwest" is a spectacular stage for Mr Grant's urbane comic everyman. He loves this - equal parts ham and cheese, washed down with bitters and Vermouth. Grant plays a smart, rich guy like Peter Lorre plays a dirty child molester; that is, with alarming credibility. The wonderful James Mason is almost as tan and suave as his nemesis, but beside Grant's heroic, well-tailored figure, he photographs like a furtive rodent. Eva Marie Saint is at her least simian, and so strikingly eager to go to bed that we forgive her ridiculous convenience to the plot, and Grant for not noting her transparency. Martin Landau does more with his malevolent queer than the role deserves, and Leo G. Carrol is if anything more droll than Cary Grant, who defined the pose.
Hitchcock is at his most superficially playful - the story is ludicrous, the emotion contrived. The whole thing shines coldly like burnished steel. It's so shallow, it shouldn't work, but it is a consistently delicious thrill ride: they mug the drunken car chase for all Grant's worth, then manage to get genuine danger out of it too; Grant's chummy relationship with his mother should be cloying but it's full of wit and charm; the idea of murder by biplane is absurd in intention, but somehow not in execution. The movie works because it plays to its limitations - the dumb laughs are breezy, the set pieces are massive and aerodynamic, the stock femme fatale is as hot as a Packard engine coasting at 100 mph. We're just along for the ride, anyway, and the scenery's exquisite.
And the scene at the UN, with the photographer flashing a shot of an innocent man standing with a bloody knife over a murder victim - the stakes rise so fast, the set-up is so quiet, the choreography so clear. Brian DePalma wishes he had such chops.