One of My Favourite Hitchcock Films

Rating: 9/10 (9 January 2005)

"North by Northwest" gets off to a mysterious start. Roger Thornhill, a New York advertising executive, is kidnapped and taken to a luxurious home in the countryside. He is interrogated by a group of men who believe that his real name is George Kaplan, and refuse to believe him when he says that he has never heard of Kaplan. The kidnappers attempt to kill Thornhill in a staged car accident, but he manages to escape. He discovers that the real owner of the house is Lester Townsend, a diplomat accredited to the United Nations, and goes to the UN building to speak to him, hoping that this will solve the mystery. Thornhill discovers that Townsend is not the man whom he met in the house, but almost immediately Townsend falls dead with a knife in his back.
Hitchcock liked to tease his audience, and this film is a good example. At this stage we are as much in the dark as Thornhill. We do not know why he has been kidnapped, who Kaplan is, why the kidnappers want him dead or why Townsend was killed. These things gradually become clearer as the film progresses. We learn that the man behind the kidnapping is named Philip Vandamm and that he is the head of a spy ring betraying America's national secrets to the Russians. Thornhill is forced to go on the run, both from Vandamm and his associates who wrongly believe him to be a CIA agent and from the police who wrongly believe him to be Townsend's killer. He manages to escape with the assistance of a mysterious blonde named Eve Kendall, who may be in league with either Vandamm or the police.
It is interesting that James Stewart was considered for the role of Thornhill but rejected in favour of Cary Grant because he "looked too old". Grant was several years older than Stewart, but was perfectly cast because this is an older man's film. Thornhill is (like a number of Hitchcock's heroes) an Everyman figure, a man who has hitherto led a prosperous but uneventful life in a routine job. He has no middle name, but has taken to calling himself Roger O. Thornhill. He is well aware of, and makes a joke of, the fact that this set of initials spells "rot", but is perhaps unaware of the symbolism of placing a meaningless zero at the centre of his name, with an implication that there is also a meaningless zero at the centre of his life. He has twice been married, but both marriages ended in divorce because his wives found his life too dull. Now, in middle age, he finds himself confronted with the possibility of adventure and of romance with Eve, with whom he has fallen in love.
Eve is rather older than the normal Hitchcock heroine. Eva Marie Saint was thirty-five years old when she made the film, a decade older than, say, Kim Novak had been at the time of making "Vertigo", Hitchcock's previous film. Although Ms Saint's looks could have been those of a woman ten years younger, her voice and mannerisms were more suggestive of a sophisticated older woman than of a young girl. (She gave what must have been one of the most seductive performances ever given in a film with no overtly erotic content). Eve was originally Vandamm's mistress but, on learning of his illegal activities, agreed to help bring him to justice because, as she puts it, it was the first time she had been asked to do something worthwhile. For both Thornhill and Eve, the entanglement represents a chance to make a fresh start in life.
Another excellent performance comes from James Mason as Vandamm, an outwardly suave, debonair English gentleman. This characterisation may owe something to a notorious case some years earlier when Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, two young Britons from privileged establishment backgrounds, defected to Moscow after being exposed as part of a Communist spy ring. This impression is strengthened by the implication contained in the film that Leonard, Vandamm's henchman, is homosexual, as were both Burgess and MacLean.
The film's most famous scene is the scene where Thornhill is menaced by the crop-dusting plane. Hitchcock may have included this sequence as a deliberate challenge to his ingenuity. The normal convention in thrillers is that suspenseful scenes exploit one or the other of two common phobias, claustrophobia or vertigo, and take place either in an enclosed space or high up where there is a danger of falling. (Hence the expression "cliff-hanger" for any tense situation; the film also contains a good example of a cliff-hanger in the literal sense, the final scene on Mount Rushmore). The crop-duster scene, however, is set in flat open country, but still generates great tension as Thornhill races for the cornfield, which provides the only cover in an otherwise featureless landscape.
The film contains a number of elements which had become familiar features of Hitchcock's work- the man wrongly accused of a crime, espionage, a train journey, a glamorous blonde heroine, a chase sequence, an element of comic relief (especially the auction scene) and a cliff-hanging finale at a famous landmark. Despite this familiarity, however, the film never declines (as do some of his lesser works) into mere film-making by numbers; Hitchcock was able to use a tested formula to produce something fresh and exciting. Evidence of the film's success is provided by the fact that a number of other directors pay homage to it in their works; the nudist colony scene in Mark Robson's "The Prize" is a direct reference to the auction scene, and Stanley Donen's "Charade" borrows the device of the villain using another man's identity. (In that film too the victim is a diplomat). Apart from its immediate successor, "Psycho", "North by Northwest" remains my favourite Hitchcock work. 9/10