Now I Don't Mind Being Abducted Every Now and Then, But

Rating: 8/10 (3 November 2011)

Over time, it seems like Hitchcock went from a sure-fire formula for fast-paced thrillers to glossy melodramas to thrillers of a philosophically and symbolically ambitious order. North by Northwest looks like a tinker toy or a daydream after The Wrong Man and Vertigo. Hitchcock and Lehman are not especially serious about their whodunit and allow the spirit of Hitchcock's Gaumont halcyon days to breathe with new VistaVision life. With a whimsical bearing and an offhand drollness, they're spinning their welcomingly familiar wheels right from the start as they unravel a cheerfully unlikely plot. Their literal and figurative pinnacle is carried a little too far and there's the occasional hazier patch, but they do pilot us on a most picturesque, absorbing and joyous chase. Hitchcock's glossy, ironic, mistrustful thriller encapsulated the spirit of the time entirely: Cold War dubiousness, refined modernization, the entomological commotion of city life and a suggestion of alarm behind the silky suits of prosperity.
Shadow of a Doubt was another, in my opinion better, thriller by Hitchcock that evoked the darkness beneath a civilized gloss. It was one of the things Hitchcock was best at doing. He could make a cymbal a signal of death and a glass of milk too, for that matter. But what makes North by Northwest charming in its own right, aside from one of the greatest film scores ever written, is its modernism. It's not a matter of tradition as a façade, but the closest thing to the life we return to when the movie's over. This is the world being lived in at the moment of the story's unraveling. And yet you can still be picked out of huge crowd and mistaken for a spy. A fancy art auction can still be a life-or-death strategy game for a microfilm of government secrets.
Cary Grant gives the 39 Steps and Saboteur formula a three-dimensional quality with a persona that had aged like wine. Thinking of the dashing, black-haired dork of The Awful Truth or Gunga Din or Arsenic and Old Lace, it's so welcome to see him twenty years later managing those inimitable contortions, flabbergasted looks, nippy grins and gallantry with certified style and refinement. He may be the wrong guy, but he's still culpable for the smugness, materialism and negligence in his expository interactions. Thornhill is a lucrative ad exec, making a living by misrepresenting truth and deluding society. He shall be divested of his self-satisfied finish by progressively more noxious situations, and redress his improprieties before he can be freed from indictments of lethal ones.
This, more in the first half of the movie than the second, brings out the best of his bone-dry incredulity. He's hilarious because of how petty he makes his more-than-legitimate outrage seem, like when he tells his kidnappers it's one thing to be abducted, but he had tickets for the theatre tonight that he was very much looking forward to. Even close to the end, he's justifying his endangerment of himself to see all the intrigue through to the finish because he doesn't want to shortchange the incomes of his dependent mother, ex-wife and bartender.
Again though, if you need Cary to play off a female co-star, why in the world would it not be Irene Dunne? You need a distinctive, idiosyncratic charmer to add depth to Eve Kendall, because she's nothing more than another in Hitchcock's long line of passive blonde decorations. And after Doris Day drew out one of his fullest, most urgent female performances in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the safe, cursory timidity of the boundaries succumbed to by Jill St. John seems bolstered.
While not as cunningly inventive as Strangers on a Train, or as shrewdly flirtatious as Notorious, this is one of Hitchcock's most pleasurable American thrillers. It just doesn't have the drum-tight, pared-down briskness of The 39 Steps or The Lady Vanishes, so it carries on too long, softening the mold holding together an assortment of scenes and actions it's obliged to make room for, such as the crop-duster sequence of course, as well as the manhunt on Mt. Rushmore, or Thornhill evading his pursuers at an auction by shocking the room with ludicrous bids. Still though, they're model set pieces, with a graciously high cinematic spirit.