North by Northwest: Climbing the peak
"I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself slightly killed."
America in 1959 was a colossus, both economically and militarily. The income of every citizen had almost doubled since the end of World War II. The country was the unquestioned leader of the free world, having assumed the role from older powers such as Britain and France, and was the self-appointed bulwark against the spread of Communism.
Wealthy suburbs and hearty middle-class bastions had sprung up across the country, and with major league baseball spreading to California, the nation felt cohesive, almost finished in a way. But there was a deep anxiety underneath. It was not only felt by those such as African-Americans and women who weren’t able to join in the prosperity, but by everyone living with the seemingly unstoppable build-up of nuclear arms and lethal technology on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
If America was at the height of its powers, so too was director Alfred Hitchcock, who had migrated to Hollywood from Britain before the war, symbolizing in his own way the transfer of influence from Europe to the states. Hitchcock in the 1950s took his craftsmanship to a new level in movies such as Rear Window and Vertigo, painting on a wider canvas, taking bigger chances and exploring richer psychological themes. He was also a master of popular entertainment, one of greatest showmen the culture has ever known.
North by Northwest was a product of those currents: a preposterously entertaining film, a less-than-subtle mediation on the Cold War, and a snapshot of American largesse in the late 1950s. It is expertly crafted, confident in presentation and sublime in execution. It is, in varying ways, a thriller, a comedy, a sex farce, a spy film, a romance, a road movie, a piece of Pop Art, and a send-up of Hitch’s own past work. It is also one of those classic movies that could serve as a gateway for people who think old movies are boring or lack modern polish. It’s one of those films, like The Wizard of Oz or 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose images — the crop-duster attack, the chase atop the faces of Mt. Rushmore — are somehow familiar to those who have never seen the actual movie. If you don’t enjoy this, I can’t help you. You’re probably the person who complained about the mechanical shark looking fake in Jaws.
It's also arguably Hitchcock’s most American film, one that indulges in the iconography of his adopted country in an almost intoxicated way. Hitchcock is probably the most famous, most discussed and most analyzed filmmaker who has ever lived, so I’m not going to pretend I have anything new to say about him. But it strikes me what a love letter to America this movie is, even, as I noted above, it was mindful about the darker concerns churning beneath its sparkling, Vista Vision images.
Considered to be one of the 100 greatest American films of all time, it not only features Hitchcock at his most accessible, but is a study in collaboration, with meaningful contributions from screenwriter Ernest Lehman, composer Bernard Herrmann, and Saul Bass who designed the title sequence of letters sliding down a Manhattan skyscraper.
The crowning touch is its star, Cary Grant, who doesn’t seem to be immersed in the film as much as he glides atop it. As Madison Avenue ad executive Roger Thornhill, he is the buffed and polished product of the new prosperity, handsome, wealthy and entitled, a cheerful avatar of mass consumption.1 When he is kidnapped from the Oak Room at the Plaza, he isn’t nervous, he’s indignant. How dare they? He has theater tickets for the evening.
In his impeccably tailored gray suit and unflappable demeanor, he is Bond before Bond, Draper before Draper. The famous line about Cary Grant was that he was a character played by Archie Leach, Grant’s real name, too impossibly charming and attractive to be real. And Hitchcock wisely leans into that rather than try to deconstruct Grant’s image as he had done with James Stewart in Rear Window and Vertigo. Hitchcock had no interest in subverting Grant’s appeal by giving him psychological tics. The worst you can say about Thornhill is that he shares a certain selfishness with other Hitchcock protagonists such as Rear Window’s L.B. Jeffries, but it never crosses over into anything toxic or obsessive.
Thornhill becomes a pawn of U.S. intelligence agents trying to get the goods on a Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), suspected of trafficking in government secrets to the Soviets. They’ve created a fictitious agent named George Kaplan, whom they move about from city to city, to keep Vandamm distracted from his true pursuers. Once Thornhill is mistaken for Kaplan – and framed for the murder of a diplomat at the United Nations — he’s forced to go on the run. His only help comes from an amorous blonde, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who may have her own agenda. (“How does a girl like you get to be a girl like you?” Thornhill says to her at one point.)
Don’t busy yourself much with the plot, however. Hitchcock never did. That’s why he was known for coining the term “MacGuffin” – about the thing, sometimes never explained, that everyone desires in the movie. The thing itself doesn’t matter, only the motivation to get it.
Like any good Hitchcock film, there are surprises, reversals and moments of riveting suspense, such as when Thornhill is chased by a crop-dusting plane in an Indiana field. That sequence has been ripped off so often in various forms that it won’t seem fresh, but it remains effective, particularly its slam-bang conclusion.2 Even that doesn’t do much to break Thornhill’s stride. Once he returns to his room at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago, he has his gray suit sponged and pressed and he’s as good as new. We should all live life so effortlessly.
The movie is not only Hitchcock’s most American because of a plot that takes Thornhill from New York to Chicago to South Dakota and Mt. Rushmore, but because it’s so evocative of its time and place. The angular modernism of the United Nations complex (including the famous overhead shot done with matte paintings), the warmth of the paneling of the Oak Room, the busy hive of Grand Central Station, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house perched above Mt. Rushmore – all speak to a moment when the country seemed to be bursting with energy and industriousness.
The film flows effervescently like good champagne. So, it comes as a bit of a shock when Thornhill meets up with government spy known only as “the Professor” (Leo G. Carroll), the man who put the entire Kaplan scheme into motion, and hears some disturbing news about the state of play in the world.
“I don’t like the games you play, Professor.”
“War is hell, Mr. Thornhill, even when it’s a cold one.”
Maybe then it’s worth losing a few cold wars, Thornhill suggests.
“I’m afraid we’re already doing that.”
Losing the Cold War? It might seem surprising that a piece of popular entertainment would so blithely assert something like that amidst its cocktail-hour dialogue, but there was a prevailing belief in the late 50s that the U.S. was indeed falling behind the Soviets technologically.
The launch of Sputnik in 1957, the first satellite to reach Earth orbit, had deeply shaken American confidence. Never mind that the U.S. had been ahead on nuclear weapons – that was ancient history. Now there were growing fears that the U.S.S.R. was building intercontinental ballistic missiles at a greater rate than the U.S. Soon, those concerns would fuel the Space Race in the 1960s.3
That line of dialogue in the film was intended to remind Thornhill of the stakes at hand, but Hitchcock was also having Grant’s character question whether the nation was keeping hold of its values. One of Hitchcock’s most prolific motifs was the idea of the “wrong man” – the wrongfully accused suspect on the run. It’s not hard to draw the line between those protagonists and the directors and screenwriters who were victims of 50s anti-Communist paranoia. And as in last week’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, there’s the suggestion that any asset involved in the game is disposable when the time comes.
But look, let’s not get too in the weeds here. It’s New Year’s. And like I said, this is a movie that goes down like champagne and popcorn, a better combination than you think. Let’s save the seriousness for 2024 when we’ll need it.
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: North by Northwest is streaming on Tubi, which has a better collection of older films than you might think. It’s also easily rentable on any major platform.
HEY ISN’T THAT: It’s the first big role for Martin Landau as Leonard, Vandamm’s henchman, who would go to star in “Mission: Impossible” on TV and later have a number of well-received supporting roles in the 1980s and 90s such as Crimes and Misdemeanors and Ed Wood. By the way, the director of the last three Mission: Impossible films, Christopher McQuarrie, is a big fan of North by Northwest, and it’s not hard at all to see its influence all over those movies.)
DUST CLOUDS: The Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, sparking an international panic— as much for the fact that the Soviets had rockets that could reach orbit as to the idea that it could place a satellite there. It led then-U.S. President Eisenhower to declare that the U.S.S.R. had outpaced America scientifically and technologically and call for an intense push to expand the nation’s capacity in science and defense.
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 4/10 We don’t know what was in the microfilm, but let’s infer it was bad.
WHAT I’VE BEEN WATCHING: Film: The Spanish Prisoner (Mamet, 1997); It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946); Radio Days (Allen, 1987). TV: “For All Mankind” (S4, Apple); “Fargo” (S5, Hulu); “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” (S1, Paramount); “Slow Horses” (S3, Apple).
HAVE A COMMENT OR SUGGESTION? email: nucleartheater@gmail.com
LAST ENTRY: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)
NEXT ENTRY: Oppenheimer (2023). I have to go Iowa to cover the caucuses, so why not discuss every living thing on earth perishing in nuclear flame?
His middle initial is “O.” When asked what it stands for, Thornhill, the soulless ad man, replies, “Nothing.”
Including by past Nuclear Theater entrant From Russia with Love.
The following year, in 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy would run for president with the pledge that he would close the “missile gap” between the Soviets and the U.S. that in reality, did not exist.