The many varied stories about the inception of North by Northwest are as entertaining as the film itself. Here are the bare facts: Alfred Hitchcock agreed to a first-time two-picture deal with MGM, and for the first film he wanted to adapt Hammond Innes’ best-seller, The Wreck of the Mary Deare. This would give Hitchcock the chance to finally work with Gary Cooper (after Cooper had turned down the starring role in Foreign Correspondent in 1940.) This would be the fifth of seven collaborations with Bernard Herrmann, and the composer suggested Hitchcock hire his friend Ernest Lehman to write the screenplay. After collaborating for a couple of weeks, Lehman wanted to quit because he could find no way to craft a compelling script out of the novel. Hitchcock agreed that what they were coming up with was a boring trial drama. (Ultimately the novel was made into a film, starring Cooper and directed by Michael Anderson; based on critical and audience opinion, that final product seemed to prove Hitchcock and Lehman’s point.)
Now things get apocryphal: according to Lehman, Hitchcock asked him what he would like to write instead, and he replied, “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” At that point, the director supposedly replied that he had always wanted to stage a final chase across the faces of Mount Rushmore, and he and Lehman began to craft the story that would ultimately become North by Northwest. This, however, does not account for the fact that a journalist named Otis Guernsey had drafted a treatment based on an operation he encountered during World War II called “Operation Mincemeat,” where a dead soldier was transformed into a fictitious spy-courier to trick the Germans. Guernsey had sold the treatment to Hitchcock nearly nine years earlier. In addition, one of the tall tales that Hitchcock liked to hand to journalists was his dream of making a movie where Cary Grant would be hiding out in President Lincoln’s nose on Mount Rushmore, only to be discovered by the enemy when he sneezed.
North by Northwest is thus the cobbling together of this idea and that vision by the director in collaboration with one of his most talented fans, and the two of them thoroughly enjoyed picking through Hitchcock’s bag of tricks and trying to create the ultimate example of each theme and iconic image, starting with Roger Thornhill, the ultimate typical Hitchcock hero – much married yet averse to real marital commitment, childishly devoted to his mother, vaguely bored with life (“Do I seem heavyish to you?”), who through a simple act of mistaken identity finds himself racing across the country, pursued by the police and enemy spies as he tries to clear his name, stumbling upon his better self along the way.
James Stewart really wanted to play Roger – Hitchcock’s favorite man of reaction becoming a man of action. But Hitchcock envisioned Grant as the right man for this job. Fortunately, Stewart was signed to Bell, Book and Candle (with Vertigo co-star Kim Novak), and no feelings were hurt. The character of Roger, originally conceived as a travelling salesman (suitable for Stewart, the Everyman), was changed to a Madison Avenue advertising executive to suit the more patrician Grant.
The plot, too is quintessential Hitchcock. The idea of a wrongly accused man assisted by a beautiful blonde hearkens as far back as The Lodger (1927). The episodic cross-country journey was first seen in The 39 Steps (1935) and made its American debut in Saboteur (1942). More trains, more public monuments, more Leo G. Carroll and Doreen Lang. We are definitely in familiar territory. What Lehman wanted to do was make every element shine as the biggest and the best version of what Hitchcock loved to do, and that is certainly the case here. The film is linked by three glorious set pieces: a wonderful introduction to Roger’s entrapment, a bravura centerpiece involving the most harrowing death trap in the canon, and a gloriously far-fetched finale right near Lincoln’s nose. At 136 minutes, this is Hitchcock’s longest film, and sometimes you feel it a little, but after thirty-two years of making thrillers, the director had a lot of tricks in that bag to put on full display.
Here, Hitchcock throws in all he has with style and wit, and he has the perfect cast to help him out. At 55 years old, Grant is still stunningly handsome and fit, clad in a gray suit that would go on to inspire fashion designers, authors and other actors and filmmakers for decades to come. Hitchcock delights in literally throwing dirt on that suit and the actor inside it, trying to “flap” the unflappable Grant. Add to the ultimate Hitchcock leading man the perfect Hitchcock blonde, perfectly embodied by Eva Marie Saint. The fact that we are never bothered by Saint being twenty years younger than Grant (as opposed to the gap between Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo) says a lot about both actors. One of my favorite stories concerns Saint’s costumes as Eve Kendall, created by MGM and so despised by the director that, just like Scottie did for Judy at the San Francisco boutique Ransohoff’s in Vertigo, Hitchcock took Saint to Bergdorf Goodman in New York and bought her a whole new wardrobe. (Unlike Judy, Saint did not feel like Hitchcock’s puppet here – she loved the clothes.)
After the darkness of the last two films, it’s nice to return to the deft humor we found in Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. Bernard Herrmann’s sparkling score gets us off to a grand start: the credits roll under pounding drums and a combined sense of menace and wit. We meet Roger on Madison Avenue as he’s heading to a business lunch after tossing a dozen instructions to his harried secretary. When he gets to the Palace Hotel to meet his clients, the orchestra is playing Jimmy McHugh’s “It’s a Most Unusual Day.” The world already knows something that Roger doesn’t, but he’s going to have to catch up fast.
It’s significant that Roger’s childlike relationship with his mother, always a no-no in Hitchcock, is what first gets him into trouble. He has a date with her for the evening and needs to call her to change the original plans he made. He raises his hand for a waiter just as a pageboy calls out the name “George Kaplan,” and for the rest of the film Roger will be mistaken for, or forced to play, Kaplan, a mysterious spy who, it turns out, doesn’t even exist.
The ultimate hero, the ultimate mistake in identity (ultimate from being so completely arbitrary) – and then the ultimate double in James Mason as Philip Vandamm. One couldn’t imagine another actor of the time who could match Grant in suavity, and their first meeting is as brittle as a scene from Oscar Wilde. Add the pair of goons with spy’s accents and the silky lethality of Martin Landau as Leonard, Vandamm’s . . . . . . “secretary,” and the scene builds in both comedy and suspense until Roger has a bottle of bourbon poured down his throat and is then himself poured into his car. Once again, Cary Grant is careening through a drunk driving spree (the last time was in Notorious, but it was Ingrid Bergman who was sauced), and it’s hilarious.
One could argue that with North by Northwest Hitchcock, seriously pissed off by the failure of Vertigo to capture the hearts and minds of spectators and critics, was playing it safe. My theory is that he created a film that was, in many ways, just as dark as the films that had preceded it, but was so perfectly imbued with his sense of humor that nobody at the time recognized just how dark it was. So much of what we find here was shown to us under wholly different circumstances in Notorious. Here are just a few examples:
- Cary Grant plays a man whose life and job have numbed him. In Northwest, he carries a handkerchief with his initials: ROT. The “O,” he explains to Eve, stands for nothing.
- Like Bergman’s Alicia, Eva Marie Saint’s character is a woman who is being played by both sides. She was in love with Vandamm when the government approached her to play Mata Hari for the sake of national security. Now she is essentially prostituting herself for both sides in order to “do her duty” . . . and stay alive.
- The bad guy in both movies is charming and harbors true feelings for the good girl, feelings which are dashed when he finds out she is working against him. At that point, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) turns for help to his beloved mother, and in Northwest, Vandamm turns to his beloved . . . . . . . “secretary.”
- the prize at the end of the road – the Maguffin, if you will – is ultimately ridiculous. In fact, the Maguffin in Northwest, a statue full of microfilm, may be the most inconsequential of its kind in any film.
For our bonus film this week, Elliot gave us Charade which, on the surface, pairs up nicely with North by Northwest. Grant is back in his third from final role. He is 59, and the years definitely show more than they did in the earlier film. And yet, here with Audrey Hepburn, who was 34 at the time, one still doesn’t scoff – not much, at least – at the pairing. I have seen Charade many times and find it fun. This time, however, it paled in comparison to Hitchcock, whose work was clearly the model for Stanley Donen’s direction. Both films contain a great deal of danger, even violent death, yet couched in the veneer of a sophisticated romantic comedy. Even so, every shot in Hitchcock’s film is richer in detail and meaning, and a bunch of us in class scoffed at the prospect of comparing them.
At least Charade gives us a moment where we can ponder what might have been had Hitchcock worked with Hepburn, as he wanted to and nearly did (in an adaptation of Henry Cecil’s No Bail for the Judge that never got made.) Like Grace Kelly or Eva Marie Saint, Audrey Hepburn could be classy, sexy, and vulnerable, all rolled up into one. She was arguably a better actor than Kelly, too, and one wonders if she might have been the archetypal Hitchcock brunette – if such a creature could even exist.
And yet, despite the excellent casting, Charade lacks something that North by Northwest has in spades: Hitchcock. The careful storyboarding he did allowed the director to inject humor and meaning into the final product. Take that centerpiece of the film, the crop duster scene. It is brilliantly audacious and, I have to say, it made the perfect scene to teach basic filmmaking to a class of students. From the opening bird’s eye angle of a road stop in the heart of the country, to the deliberate pacing of the early moments as a bus drops Roger off for his appointment/deathtrap and he finds himself, literally and figuratively, at a crossroads. He waits and waits . . . and waits, and we wait and wait . . . and WAIT with him as car after car swooshes by, covering Roger with dust to further befuddle him. Then the man gets dropped off, and the shot of the two strangers facing off brings to mind a Western showdown . . . except we know that the stranger Roger is facing down is just that, a stranger.
And when the man scratches his jaw and says, “That’s funny . . . that plane is dusting crops where there ain’t no crops,” Hitchcock has us screaming, “Get outta there, Roger, before it’s too late!” In typical Hitchcock fashion, we are one step ahead of the protagonist, which puts us in an even greater agony of suspense. And then when the plane finally strikes, we marvel at how danger can be found even in the peace and sunshine of wide-open spaces. In fact, those spaces are now an enemy to Roger, who needs shelter fast! We can barely catch our breaths before the explosive climax, and we marvel at how the inimitable Cary Grant allowed himself to place his sleek, suave body under the chassis of an oil tanker.
In a lesser film, this would be the climax (although anyone would be lucky to create a climax half as good). But we’ve only hit the halfway point. There’s still the whole back and forth between Roger and Eve to be had, the recruitment of Roger into the government’s plan (and the first sign that he is growing up since he only agrees to help in order to save Eve.) There’s the tensely funny scene at the auction, the shocking face-off in the cafeteria, and the whole final section on Mount Rushmore that sprang from Hitchcock’s imagination so long ago. (Sadly, there is no giveaway sneeze within Lincoln’s nose.) Right up to the final shot where Roger clings to Eve as she dangles over the precipice, then lifts her up . . . to the top bunk of a train compartment, calling her “Mrs. Thornhill” as the train bursts suggestively through a tunnel, giving a lovely finger to the censors before “THE END” hits the screen.”
It’s no wonder that North by Northwest is many people’s favorite Hitchcock film, and I have to say that I really enjoyed myself this time around, focusing on the repartee between Roger, Eve, Vandamm and Leonard, the genial monsters played by Leo G. Carroll and Jessie Royce Landis . . . in short, the wit. It doesn’t quite cut it (sorry!) the way Rear Window does, but it’s a rollicking good time.
Leave it to Hitchcock, then, to move from the ultimate experience to a completely new one, a film that would change the course of genre filmmaking from its premiere all the way to our present day. Next week, a double bill so dark and vicious that nurses were hired to tend to fainting filmgoers. See you next week.
Oh, and bring your mother.
Ah Sweet Mystery! 
My take on the film, made with my friend Nick Santa Maria, is— much like Hitchcock’s film— largely about questions of identity:
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LOL
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Scott, forgive me. I first came upon your comment on my WordPress app where it only showed as an image. Later, when I saw it on my blog, I saw it was a link to a video. I just watched it, and it’s hilarious. Both your accents are great, and I love when your James Mason slips into Cary Grant at the very end. Because, after all, they are the most perfect doubles in all of Hitchcock! Nice A&C homage as well! First base, er, first class!
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Thanks!
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It’s a fab movie and I love the whole non-existent spy mix-up scenario. I do think that the Mount Rushmore finale is, despite being one of the bases for the project, a bit laboured and dull, the film slowing down considerably for the final lap. (The studio sets don’t help). But it’s terrific fun. MARY DEARE is actually an OK movie (Eric Ambler was no slouch) but a bit dull, true. Also, if one were being pedantic (who, me?), Hitchcock’s longest film is actually TOPAZ by 7 whole minutes, but I can see how you’d forget that movie … 😆
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I grant you the point about the Mount Rushmore sequence, although I didn’t feel the length so much this time. Don’t hate me, but I’ve never watched Topaz (or Torn Curtain) for that matter. I know, I know!)
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TOPAZ is not great and was released in different versions and lengths. But if you plan go give it a go, try and get the Blu-ray as it has two alternate endings, an analysis of the cuts made to some prints and best of all offers a wonderful appreciation by Leonard Maltin that runs about half an hour and in which he rightly acknowledges the deficiencies but celebrates some very good bits.
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PS And of course the Operation Mincemeat strory was filmed as THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS, a really entertaining war movie with Clifton Webb and Gloria Grahame (a bizarre pairing but in truth they don’t really meet).
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I’ve never watched Topaz (or Torn Curtain) for that matter
Topaz is a total turkey. Torn Curtain is sunk by the worst casting of his career. Paul Newman (a terrible actor anyway) is ludicrously out of place in a Hitchcock film. The movie needed Cary Grant. Julie Andrews is equally bad and out of place.
And it was the wrong movie for 1966. Bond Mania was in full swing and Torn Curtain seems quaint and creaky and hopelessly old-fashioned. Had it been made in 1960 with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint (or even Kim Novak) it might have been a major hit. It’s a classic 1950s Hitchcock movie made in the wrong decade.
Topaz (apart from its many other problems) also has that problem of feeling quaint and old-fashioned. Hitchcock just didn’t “get” the 1960s.
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If I had to choose, North by Northwest would probably be my pick for favorite Hitchcock. It checks all the boxes that I think make Hitchcock the master he was. If it does not feature the moodiness of Vertigo, it at least doubles down on the dark humor and emerges feeling light, breezy, and just gosh-darn entertaining. A good case can be made that this is the prototype for the first few James Bond films (no wonder Cary Grant was the original choice for Bond); the elegance that director Terence Young would bring to those movies is felt in spades here.
It sounds like I like Charade more than you do. Despite the claim that it’s the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never directed, it has its own unique charms and quirks. Charade is very much its own movie, but it goes to show what an iconic brand Hitchcock really was by the mid-60s when his style is being aped to such a degree.
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Nick, it sounds like I agree with you on both counts. On NxNW, it may go back to my introduction to it when it was new, and how I had grown into it from 2 previous Hitchcocks, all when they were new, in family outings to the drive-in movies. It was of course expected that the kids in the back seat would fall asleep for the second (more grown-up) feature. I, the oldest, was intrigued by Rear Window but didn’t make it through. I did make it through The Man Who Knew Too Much (intrigued by the two ways in which music was crucial), but needed parental help to follow it. By the time of North by Northwest, I was primed, and I took delight in following (nearly?) all the plot turns and enjoying the humor and suspense. It was essentially my entry into non-kiddie films, and the meaning of the name Hitchcock (a familiar TV figure though I wasn’t yet sure why). When I started buying DVDs back when DVD players came on the market, this was unhesitatingly my first Hitchcock (may still be my only one).
And Charade continues to hold a high place for me too. (In “best Hitchcock movie that he didn’t direct,” it may have a little competition from Night Train to Munich, with its multiple links to The Lady Vanishes.) Stanley Donen had a deft touch with this sort of thing (Two for the Road is on my all-time favorite list), the stars are tops, the supporting players are just right, the suspense and twists may be elementary but work just the same, and the main titles (aided by a fine Mancini score) are in the best tradition of such things.
Incidentally, though only musicians like me will care, North by Northwest is one of the very few movies whose score is published complete. https://omnimusicpublishing.com/product/bernard-herrmanns-north-by-northwest-full-orchestral-score/ I snapped it up the moment I heard about it.
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We can never overestimate the gift that Bernard Herrmann brought to film after film for Hitchcock, and this one is brilliant. That moment when the oil tanker starts to explode and Roger starts to run, the theme music playing underneath. Joyous!
The first Hitchcock I ever got an inkling of was The Birds – not his best but certainly one of his scariest. For me, everything pales next to Rear Window, but diverse opinion is what makes these discussions so much fun!
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We discussed NbyNW as the progenitor for the Bond films in our class; I think there has actually been some writing done on this. And it’s not that I don’t like Charade! My problem was comparing it to Hitchcock here. After eight weeks of swimming amongst the Master’s best films, I feel like Charade is best appreciated on its own and pales in comparison. I would be more interested in looking at De Palma, who found a way to honor Hitchcock and still make his own style of films.
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Don’t start me on De Palma, Brad! I am endlessly fascinated by his body of work – from his deliberate Hitchcockian homages (DRESSED TO KILL, BODY DOUBLE) to the films that are his through and through (BLOW OUT, UNTOUCHABLES, CARLITO’S WAY). I think Quentin Tarantino praised De Palma for going to the places Hitchcock couldn’t/wouldn’t go and it’s an interesting comparison. But if I go down *that* rabbit hole, there’s little chance of turning back!
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Theatre major, were we?
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Theatre major and un-ashamed lifelong film buff.
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NbyNW brought the spy movie out of the shadows into the bright sunshine, and in glorious colour. It established the concept of the spy movie as a big expansive production with spectacular visual set-pieces and a lot of style. In 1959 it was revolutionary.
Then three years late along came Dr No, which remains the most important spy movie ever made. It instantly made NbyNW look old-fashioned and stuffy and stodgy. Dr No was faster paced, it was sexier, it was more violent, it had more action, it had a more outrageous comic-book style villain. It had a younger sexier star. It had a more sexy leading lady who wore fewer clothes than Eva Marie Saint.
And Dr No looked up to date. It was in touch with the zeitgeist of the 60s. In fact it played a major role in creating that zeitgeist. Dr No was a spy movie for younger audiences. NbyNW by comparison was the sort of spy movie your Mum and Dad watched. It became instantly uncool. And by comparison with Dr No it was very slow.
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I don’t actually disagree with you, D, about any of this. We spent some time in class talking about NbyNW as the basis for the Bond films. But in another way, it’s like comparing The Women or The Group to Marvel’s The Avengers and saying the first is the sort of ensemble picture your mom and dad went to. Roger Thornhill is no spy; he’s just an ordinary, kind of tired middle-aged man who needs the stuffing kicked out of him in order to become a better person, and so he’s plunged into a world’s-stakes espionage plot. James Bond isn’t an ordinary guy at all! He’s a super-man who’s a better looker, fighter, and lover than any of us will ever be. In that sense, Sean Connery was much better cast as Bond than Cary Grant was as Roger because Grant isn’t particularly ordinary in looks or style.
But then that’s sort of what Hitchcock is saying in all these films. You can be gorgeous or gifted, but if you don’t have a certain domestic stability, you’re lost. So he casts all these great actors as half-men, (and, next week, as killers) and forces them to grow up through these extraordinary circumstances. Bond, on the contrary, must never grow up or marry, and the extraordinary circumstances are the basis of his films, not the Maguffin. So while yes, Dr. No updated the genre and brought in the kids (and their moms and dads for many reasons), in a way, Hitchcock is doing something different that no Bond movie really attempted to do until, arguably, the Daniel Craig era.
I say this as someone who has a VERY limited knowledge of the Bond oeuvre, so I apologize in advance if my point makes no sense!
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in a way, Hitchcock is doing something different that no Bond movie really attempted to do until, arguably, the Daniel Craig era.
Yes, I’d agree with that.
The spy genre divided into three distinctive strands in the 60s. There was the super-dark cynical strand (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or The Ipcress File), the stylish sexy action strand (the Bond movies and their imitators) and the spy spoof strand. Those three strands were all very much in tune with the 60s zeitgeist.
NbyNW was left as a spy movie that seemed to encapsulate the zeitgeist of the 1950s.
That was the problem with Torn Curtain. It was a 1950s spy movie, in 1966. Hitchcock simply didn’t understand the 60s at all.
I’ve only seen one of the Daniel Craig movies. It was so awful I haven’t watched any of the others. And, interestingly enough, it was appallingly slow. It was at least an hour too long. Whereas NbyNW only seemed half an hour too long.
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I would be more interested in looking at De Palma, who found a way to honour Hitchcock and still make his own style of films.
I think Body Double is de Palma’s masterpiece. It’s a very Hitchcock-influenced movie but it’s totally a de Palma movie. And it may be the best movie of the 80s.
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The next week’s films are obvious !
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It’s easy to forget just how up-and-down Hitchcock’s Hollywood career was. In between the hits there were plenty of flops. In between the masterpieces were plenty of complete turkeys.
I think it was part of the Hitchcock genius. He was a risk-taker and he liked to experiment. It was inevitable that some of the risks wouldn’t come off and that some of the experiments would fail.
When that happened he had an amazing ability to just suddenly come up with exactly the right movie to put his career back on track. Strangers on a Train was a desperately needed critical and commercial success at a time when his career was at its lowest ebb. After I Confess he needed to re-establish his credentials as a director of hits and he came up with Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, and when Vertigo failed hey presto he pulled North By Northwest out of a hat.
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As much as I love North By Northwest, in some ways I love Charade just as much. While NBNW is certainly the greater Hitchcockian adventure, Charade is— more than the greatest Hitchcock film Hitchcock never directed— an extremely entertaining hybrid of Hitchcockian suspense with GAD plotting (an element I think Hitchcock could always have more of— indeed, I wish even Rear Window had a few more moments like the “flowers don’t grow shorter overnight” bit). Indeed, I find the backstory to Charade a fascinating variation of that in The Hollow Man, wrapped in an entertainment I find to be much more digestible than that particular Carr work. For me, Charade is one of the greatest examples of how suspense and puzzle plotting are perfectly compatible.
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You kind of confirm the point that I was making, Scott, which is . . . why compare the two? Charade is certainly more of a puzzle plot than most anything in Hitchcock. The revelation of the Big Bad at the end of Charade is something Hitchcock tended to do in the middle of his films. Sometimes, as in NbyNW, he let us know the identity before he let the hero know because for this director, the puzzle held no interest; it was the suspense that these disguises generated that he exploited for his own purposes.
You know I love a good puzzle movie as much as . . . . well, maybe there are ten of us who love them as much as we do. But while I think there are some great surprises in Hitchcock’s films (the placement of the killer in Young and Innocent, the identity of the spies in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the reveal in the middle of Vertigo, to name a few) I wouldn’t trade what Hitchcock did for versions more puzzle-centric. In fact, having recently read that Hitchcock wanted to remove that middle scene from Vertigo to keep the mystery going, and then thinking how it would have lessened the power of what happens to Judy in the second half, I have to say he was wrong in that idea, and I’m glad the studio stopped him.
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NBNW is excellent but too suave to be my favorite Hitchcock. I prefer my Hitchcock more brooding and moody …
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