My wives divorced me. Said I led too dull a life

Rating: Null/10 (21 November 2012)

Alfred Hitchcock directs "North by Northwest", a loose remake of "The 39 Steps" and "Saboteur", two earlier thrillers by the director. The film opens with a now iconic title sequence by Saul Bass, complete with a pulse pounding Bernard Herrmann score. The angular, diagonal lines of Bass' sequence then transition into a series of bustling New York City shots, followed by the brisk introduction of Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), a high flying advertising executive. Opening scenes stress Thronhill's past alcoholism and propensity for lying. This is the film's great "boy who cried wolf" joke: the film's about an untrustworthy advertising executive (who lies for a living) being repeatedly ignored when telling the truth.
Hitch started his movie career in 1919, designing graphics and cards for Lasky Studios. After three years as an assistant director he directed his first feature film, "The Pleasure Garden", in Munich Germany. This was a British/German co-production, a collaboration which led to the director slowing absorbing traits from the then burgeoning German Expressionist Movement, a movement which fed off a rise in existential philosophy and various post WW1 crises. Hitch would then direct a series of silent thrillers, in which he slowly evolved his own very distinct style. This style typically mixed a little expressionism with pop modernism, high fashion and early 20th century advertising/graphic design. The demands of silent thrillers also instilled in Hitch a strong sense of pace, cutting and visual economy. At his best his films are clean, sleek and fast, whilst also oozing a gloriously operatic kind of BIG MELODRAMA, which runs almost counter to their machine-like dispassion.
These conflicting traits are all found in "North by Northwest". It's at once Hitchcock's most famous thriller, and his longest, most lazily paced. Its at once an expressionist nightmare, and a slapstick popcorn comedy built around Cary Grant's own slapstick past. Its at once a lean silent thriller, and a bloated big budget production. These contrasts lend the film an interesting quality, but would also negatively influence over a century of copycat Hollywood thrillers which trawl for demographics and try madly to be everything to everyone all at once. Every year "Northwest" is released a couple dozen times under a different name, some new running man wrongly accused of something whilst tracking down a McGuffin in an attempt to solve some completely arbitrary problem. In each case the objective is the same: to construct a roller coaster plot which exists solely to facilitate action scenes.
Francois Truffaut picked up on this decades ago: "The most appealing aspect of these sequences is that they're totally gratuitous. [...] It's a scene that's been drained of all plausibility or even significance. But it's precisely that gratuity - which you're criticised for - that gives the scene all of its interest and strength. How can anyone object to gratuity when it's so clearly deliberate?"
Truffaut's talking about an audacious, drawn-out, near-silent "crop duster sequence" in "Northwest", which Hitchcock elevates to something special. Today, though, with the rise of set-piece cinema, virtually everything's gratuitous. Still, you can't blame Hitch for his children. "Northwest" is itself less dumb action movie than some kind of ornate, pop-modernist artifact; it's more vase than movie. Hitchcock's lines are clean, his colour coordination superb, and everything seems oh so neatly arranged. The film's art director was Robert Boyle, who in collaboration with Hitchcock gave the film its distinct look, with Frank Lloyd Wright houses, some Beaux-Art and lots of early 20th century MidWestern architecture, complete with hipped roofs, horizontal bands and ornamental rock walls. Hitchcock's aesthetic captures a kind of early 20th century American optimism; faith in industry, modernism, technology, slick ergonomics, money, decor, furnishings, top Industrial Designers (Henry Dreyfuss) and finery, even if they thematically say something else.
Hitchcock saw "Northwest" primarily as a comedy ("To me it was one big joke. I practise absurdity religiously; I wanted Grant in Lincoln's nostril"), Truffaut as a nightmare, to which Hithcock also agreed ("I'm ill at ease with the ordinary"). But the film's also very very sexy, thanks to screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write the "ultimate Hitchcock thriller" and who gives the film lots of risqué banter between Cary Grant and actress Eva Marie Saint.
The film goes some interesting places, has some fabulous shots (an overhead, external shot of the United Nations Building kills you) and set pieces, but it's also mostly a bubblegum plot with a now dated finale, stiff/old hero, bad rear-projection, corny jokes and some dull conversations. The film's title is a reference to Shakespeare's "Hamlet": "I am but mad north-north-west," Hamlet says, epitomising Thronhill's own anxieties. Of course no north-northwest exists on the compass. It's a metaphor which implies that Thornhill, like Hamlet, is a little out of tune.
Like "The Man Who Knew Too Much", much of the film plays with identities, charades, performances and role playing; everyone's pretending to be someone else, unsure who they or others are and appearances are constantly deceptive. Cold War paranoia – the film's about foreign spies and US counterintelligence – infuses everything, the film portraying rotten government bodies who callously throw lives away and who nurse paranoia at the expense of ordinary civilians. This is all encapsulated by climactic scenes in which our heroes dangle from the stony, uncaring faces of Presidents (a return to the climax of "Saboteur"). As if to punctuate the point, Hitchcock slips into the cast, unbilled, several victims of the blacklist (Joseph Wiseman etc).
All of Hitch's films have psycho-sexual weirdness. Here Eva's mid-film betrayal of Thronhill only echoes his own misogynistic past. She turns Thronhill's sarcasm and suspicions back on him, though they do eventually fall in love. Grant's character, incidentally, is constantly being mistaken for a federal agent. He played one in Hitchcock's "Notorious". Maybe that explains it.
8/10 - Worth two viewings.