North by Northwest is a
1959 American suspense film directed by
Alfred Hitchcock, starring
Cary Grant,
Eva Marie Saint and
James Mason, and featuring
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".
[Jaynes, Barbara Grant; Trachtenberg, Robert. . Burbank, California: Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and Turner Entertainment. 2004.]North by Northwest is a tale of mistaken identity, with an innocent man pursued across the United States by agents of a mysterious organization who want to stop his interference in their plans to smuggle out
microfilm containing government secrets (a classic
MacGuffin).
Author and journalist
Nick Clooney praised Lehman's original story and sophisticated dialogue, calling the film "certainly Alfred Hitchcock's most stylish thriller, if not his best".
This is one of several Hitchcock movies with a music score by
Bernard Herrmann and features a memorable opening
title sequence by graphic designer
Saul Bass. This film is generally cited as the first to feature extended use of
kinetic typography in its opening credits.
The world premiere took place at the
San Sebastian International Film Festival.
Plot
A
Madison Avenue advertising executive, Roger O. Thornhill (
Cary Grant), is mistaken for a Mr. George Kaplan and kidnapped by thugs Valerian (
Adam Williams) and Licht (
Robert Ellenstein). He is taken to the house of Lester Townsend on
Long Island. There he is interrogated by a man he assumes to be Townsend, but who is really Phillip Vandamm (
James Mason). When Thornhill repeatedly denies he is Kaplan and refuses to cooperate, Vandamm orders his right-hand man Leonard (
Martin Landau) to get rid of him.
Thornhill is forced to drink bourbon in an attempt to stage a fatal accident. However, after a car chase on a perilous road, he is rear-ended by a police patrol car and apprehended. He is charged with
drunken driving. He is unable to get the police, the judge or even his mother (
Jessie Royce Landis) to believe what happened to him, especially when a woman at Townsend's residence claims he got drunk at a dinner party; she also informs them that Townsend is a
United Nations diplomat.
Thornhill and his mother go to Kaplan's hotel room, but cannot find anyone at the hotel who has seen him.
Narrowly avoiding recapture, Thornhill takes a taxi to the
General Assembly building of the United Nations, where Townsend is due to deliver a speech. Thornhill meets Townsend face to face and is surprised to find that the diplomat is not the man who interrogated him. Then Valerian throws a knife that strikes Townsend in the back. He falls forward, dead, into Thornhill's arms. Unthinkingly, Thornhill removes the knife, making it appear to witnesses that he is the killer, forcing him to flee.
thumb|left|Thornhill (Grant) on the run, attempting to travel incognito.Knowing that Kaplan has a reservation at a
Chicago hotel the next day (Vandamm mentioned it), Thornhill goes to
Grand Central Terminal and sneaks onto the
20th Century Limited train. On board, he meets the seductive Eve Kendall (
Eva Marie Saint), who helps Thornhill evade policemen searching the train by hiding him twice—once in the overhead fold-up bunk in her
sleeping car compartment. She asks about his personalized
matchbooks with the initials ROT; he says the O
stands for nothing.
Unbeknownst to Thornhill, Eve is working with Vandamm and Leonard, who are in another compartment. Upon arriving at Chicago's
LaSalle Street Station, Thornhill borrows the uniform of one of the
porters and carries Eve's luggage through the crowd, eluding police. Eve (who is Vandamm's lover) lies to Thornhill, telling him she has arranged a meeting with Kaplan. She gives him directions to the place.
In an iconic sequence, Thornhill travels by bus to an isolated crossroads, with flat countryside all around and nobody in sight. Another man finally arrives, but then takes the next bus. Before he leaves, the puzzled stranger observes that a
biplane is "
dusting crops where there ain't no crops." Without warning, the plane flies towards Thornhill and the pilot begins shooting at him. He flees to the only cover, a cornfield, but the plane dusts it with pesticide, forcing him out. Desperate for help, Thornhill steps in front of a speeding gasoline
tank truck, which stops barely in time. The plane crashes into it and explodes. When passing drivers stop to see what is going on, Thornhill steals a pickup truck and flees.
Thornhill returns to the Chicago hotel, where he is surprised to learn that Kaplan had already checked out when Eve claimed to have spoken to him. A suspicious Thornhill goes to Eve's room. She allows him to get his suit cleaned and use the shower as she leaves. From the impression of a message written on a notepad, Thornhill learns her destination: an art auction.
There, he finds Vandamn, Leonard, and Eve. Vandamm purchases a pre-Columbian
Tarascan statue and leaves. Thornhill tries to follow, only to find all exits covered by Vandamm's men. Thinking quickly, he begins placing nonsensical bids, making such a nuisance of himself that the police have to be called to remove him.
Thornhill identifies himself as a wanted fugitive, but en route to the police station, the officers are ordered to take him instead to the airport (where a gate for
Northwest Airlines is seen, playing on the film's title). There, he meets the Professor (
Leo G. Carroll), a spymaster who is after Vandamm. The Professor reveals that George Kaplan does not exist; he was invented to distract Vandamm from the real government agent—Eve, whose life is now in danger. To protect her, Thornhill agrees to help the Professor.
They fly to
Rapid City, South Dakota, where Thornhill (now pretending to be Kaplan) meets Eve and Vandamm in a crowded cafeteria at the base of
Mount Rushmore. He offers to let Vandamm leave the country unhindered in exchange for Eve, but is turned down. When he tries to keep her from leaving, Eve shoots Thornhill and flees. He is taken away in an ambulance. At a secluded spot, however, he emerges unharmed, having been shot with
blanks. To his dismay, he learns that, having proven her loyalty, she will accompany Vandamm. To keep him from interfering further, Thornhill is locked in a hospital room by the Professor.
Thornhill manages to escape. He goes to Vandamm's mountainside home, scales the exterior and slips inside undetected. He learns that the microfilm has been put inside the Tarascan statue. While Eve is out of the room, Leonard fires the gun she used at Vandamm, demonstrating how the shooting was faked. Vandamm decides to throw Eve out of the airplane once they are airborne. Thornhill manages to warn her by writing a note inside one of his distinctive matchbooks and dropping it where she can find it.
On the way to the airplane, Eve grabs the statue and joins Thornhill. Leonard and Valerian chase them across the Mount Rushmore monument. When Valerian tries to ambush the pair, he instead falls to his death. Eve slips and clings desperately to the steep mountainside. Thornhill grabs her hand, while precariously holding on with his other hand. Leonard appears and starts grinding his heel on Thornhill's hand. They are saved when the Professor directs a police marksman to shoot Leonard. Vandamm is taken into custody.
The scene transitions from Thornhill pulling Eve to safety on Mount Rushmore to him pulling her (the new Mrs. Thornhill) up onto an overhead train bunk. The final shot shows their train speeding into a tunnel.
Cast
Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In
North by Northwest he can be seen missing a bus at the end of the opening credits.
Landis, who played Thornhill's mother, was only eight years older than Grant. She also played his future mother-in-law in
To Catch a Thief.
It is rumored
James Stewart was the original choice to play Thornhill, and that Hitchcock replaced him with Grant after the poor box office performance of
Vertigo, which Hitchcock supposedly blamed on Stewart looking too old to still attract audiences. This was untrue, as Hitchcock was planning to reunite with Stewart during his next film,
The Blind Man.
MGM wanted
Cyd Charisse for the role played by Eva Marie Saint. Hitchcock stood by his choice.
Origins
thumb
John Russell Taylor's official biography of Hitchcock,
Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (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 an adaptation of the novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes. Composer Bernard Herrmann had recommended 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 United Nations Headquarters; 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 many of Hitchcock's ideas were not used. 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.
[John Brady, "The craft of the screenwriter", 1981. Page 202] Lehman responded, "but
they're trying to kill him. How are
they going to work up a cyclone?" Then, as he told an interviewer; "I just can't tell you who said what to whom, but somewhere during that afternoon, the cyclone in the sky became the crop-duster plane."
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
Otis 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 Germans wasted time following him around. Guernsey turned his idea into a story about an American traveling 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" (Lehman's version is that it was "The Man on Lincoln's Nose"
[John Brady, "The craft of the screenwriter", 1981. Page 201]) or even "The Man who
Sneezed in Lincoln's Nose," though he probably felt the latter was insulting to his adopted America. 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 collaboration with
John Michael Hayes. When Lehman came on board, the traveling salesman — which had previously been suited to
James Stewart — was adapted to a
Madison Avenue advertising executive, a position which Lehman had formerly held.
Themes and motifs
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. Writer Ernest Lehman has also mocked those who look for symbolism in the film. Despite its popular appeal, however, the movie is considered to be a masterpiece for its themes of
deception,
mistaken identity, and
moral relativism in the
Cold War era.
The central theme is that of
theatre 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." Significantly (and ironically), Thornhill is a successful advertising executive (a man who makes his living by distorting reality and deceiving the public). In the role of Thornhill, 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 (unwittingly quoting a line that Thornhill utters in the film).
The title
North by Northwest is often seen as having been taken from a line in
Hamlet, a work also concerned with the shifty nature of reality. Hitchcock noted this in an interview with
Peter Bogdanovich in 1963. Lehman however, states that he used a working title for the film of "In a Northwesterly Direction," because the film's action was to begin in
New York and climax in
Alaska.
Then the head of the story department at MGM suggested "North by Northwest," but this was still to be a working title.
Other titles were considered, including "The Man on Lincoln's Nose," but "North by Northwest" was kept because, according to Lehman, "We never did find a [better] title."
The Northwest Airlines reference in the film plays on the title. The title is not an actual
compass direction, the two closest directions being northwest by north (NWbN) and north-northwest (NNW), with the latter traditionally taken as the title's intended meaning.
The plot of this film is one of the purer versions of Alfred Hitchcock's idea of the "
MacGuffin," the physical object that everyone in the film is chasing but which has no deep relationship to the plot. Late in
North by Northwest, it emerges that the spies are attempting to smuggle
microfilm containing government secrets out of the country. They have been trying to kill Thornhill, who they believe to be the agent on their trail, "George Kaplan." Indeed, the fictitious Kaplan himself could be the "MacGuffin" of the film as Thornhill, as well as the villains, spend most of the movie vainly trying to track him down.
There are similarities between this movie and Hitchcock's earlier film
Saboteur (1942), whose final scene atop the
Statue of Liberty foreshadows the Mount Rushmore scene in the later film. In fact,
North by Northwest can be seen as the last 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 referred to as "the first
James Bond film" due to its similarities with splashily colorful settings and secret agents, not to mention the elegantly daring, wisecracking leading man. Based on the strength of
North by Northwest, Hitchcock was seriously considered to direct the first conceived Bond film by Ivar Bryce (co-owner of Xanadu Productions),
Ian Fleming, and
Kevin McClory. Hitchcock read the script that would eventually become
Thunderball and was interested in directing it. Later the team shared doubts about Hitchcock's involvement because of his minimum salary requirement and the amount of control over the picture they would have to give up. Hitchcock ultimately passed on the Bond film to direct
Psycho.
The film's final shot — that of the train speeding into a tunnel during a romantic assignation onboard — is a famous bit of self-conscious
Freudian symbolism reflecting Hitchcock's mischievous sense of humor. [In
Hitchcock / Truffaut (p.107-108), Hitchcock called it a "phallic symbol... probably one of the most impudent shots I ever made."]
Production
The filming of
North by Northwest took place between August and December 1958 with the exception of a few re-takes that were shot in April 1959.
This was the only Hitchcock film released by MGM. However, it is now owned by
Turner Entertainment — since 1996 a division of
Warner Bros. — which owns the pre-1986 MGM library.
Filming
At Hitchcock's insistence, the film was made in
Paramount's
VistaVision widescreen process, making it one of the few VistaVision films made at MGM.
The car chase scene in which Thornhill is drunkenly careening along the edge of cliffs high above the ocean, supposedly on
Long Island, was actually shot on the California coast. (Long Island is devoid of precipitous seaside cliffs.)
At the time, the
United Nations prohibited film crews from shooting around its New York City headquarters. In an example of
guerrilla filmmaking, Hitchcock used a movie camera hidden in a parked van to film Cary Grant and
Adam Williams exiting their taxis and entering the building.
The
cropduster sequence, meant to take place in northern
Indiana, was
shot on location on Garces Highway (155) near the towns of
Wasco and
Delano, north of
Bakersfield in
Kern County, California () . The aircraft seen flying in the scene is an
N3N, a World War II Navy pilot trainer. After the war, many were converted for cropdusting. The actual aircraft used survives and has been restored to its wartime markings. The aircraft that hits the truck and explodes is a wartime
Stearman (Boeing Model 75) trainer. Like its N3N lookalike, many were used for agricultural purposes through the 1970s. It's assumed that the film company bought a wrecked or worn-out plane for the explosion. At the time they would have been available for as little as a few hundred dollars. The plane was piloted by Bob Coe, a local cropduster from Wasco. Hitchcock placed replicas of square Indiana highway signs in the scene. In an extensive list of "1001 Greatest Movie Moments" of all time, the British movie magazine
Empire in its August 2009 issue ranked the cropduster scene at number one: "The Number One Greatest Movie Moment" (number two was the bicycle/moon silhouette from
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and number three was "Bond, James Bond" from
Dr. No).
When Eve shoots Thornhill in the Mount Rushmore cafeteria, a boy can be seen covering his ears just before the shot is fired.
The shootout on Mount Rushmore at the end of the film was filmed on a replica constructed in Hollywood.
Set design
The house at the end of the film was not real. Hitchcock asked the set designers to make the set resemble a house by
Frank Lloyd Wright, the most popular architect in America at the time, using the materials, form and interiors associated with him. The set was built in
Culver City, where MGM's studios were located.
Costuming
The gray suit worn by Cary Grant throughout almost the entire film has taken on somewhat iconic status. A panel of fashion experts convened by
GQ magazine in 2006 called it both the best suit in film history, and the most influential on men's style, stating that it has since been copied for
Tom Cruise's character in
Collateral and
Ben Affleck's character in
Paycheck. This sentiment has been echoed by writer
Todd McEwen, who called it "gorgeous." There is some disagreement as to who tailored the suit; according to
Vanity Fair magazine, it was
Norton & Sons of
London,, although according to
The Independent it was
Quintino of
Beverly Hills.
Eva Marie Saint's wardrobe for the film was originally entirely chosen by MGM; however, Hitchcock didn't agree with them. In the end, both the actress and director went to a shop in New York to select what she would wear. (Reference in the film's Making of.)
Editing and post-production
In
François Truffaut's book-length interview,
Hitchcock/Truffaut (1967), Hitchcock said that MGM wanted
North by Northwest cut by 15 minutes so the film's length would run under two hours. Hitchcock had his agent check his contract, learned that he had absolute control over the final cut, and refused.
One of Eva Marie Saint's lines in the dining car seduction scene was redubbed. She originally said "I never make love on an empty stomach," but it was changed in post-production to "I never discuss love on an empty stomach." It is said that the censors felt the original version was too risqué.
Release
The trailer for
North by Northwest features Hitchcock presenting himself as the owner of Alfred Hitchcock Travel Agency and telling the viewer he has made a motion picture to advertise these wonderful vacation stops. (DVD Extras- Original Trailer)
Home Video
Warner Bros. released 50th Anniversary
Region 1 DVD and
Blu-ray editions, on November 3, 2009.
Awards
North by Northwest was nominated for three
Academy Awards for
Film Editing (
George Tomasini),
Art Direction (
William A. Horning,
Robert F. Boyle,
Merrill Pye,
Henry Grace,
Frank McKelvy), and
Original Screenplay (
Ernest Lehman).
The film also won, for Lehman, a 1960
Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay.
In 1995,
North by Northwest was selected for preservation in the
United States National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
In June 2008, the AFI revealed its "Ten top Ten" — the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres — after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community.
North by Northwest was acknowledged as the seventh best film in the mystery genre.
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