Hitch's American Monument.
"It's so horribly sad," says a CIA agent in 'North by Northwest,' "how is it I feel like laughing?" It is a question one might ask of the film. Alfred Hitchcock's first movie after "Vertigo" might also have its serious implications about identity and sexual tensions, but they are kept at arm's length by the sheer delight in malevolent inventiveness. Hitchcock often recalled remarking at story conferences: "Wouldn't it be fun if we killed him this way?" "North by Northwest" remains one of the greatest of all comedy thrillers precisely because of its ability to be at its funniest when also at its most frightening. Hitchcock had long wanted to film a chase across the presidential faces sculptured into Mount Rushmore. He also had an idea for a film that would begin at the United Nations in New York and end in the wastes of Alaska. Another idea that intrigued the director was for a story involving a non-existent character or event. He remembered a conversation with a New York newspaper man who had offered him the idea of the CIA inventing a fake decoy agent in a spy plot. John Michael Hayes said that Hitch invited him to script "North by Northwest" well before Ernest Lehman was given the job. The reason that Lehman was finally chosen to write the script--apart from his impressive credentials, which included such films as "Sabrina," "Executive Suite," and "Sweet Smell of Success"--was MCA's negotiation for Hitchcock of a one-picture deal with M-G-M, where Lehman happened to be under contract. The two began to work, calling their project "In a Northwesterly Direction," a title later changed at the suggestion of M-G-M itself. Hitchcock's exploitation of the dramatic contrast between bizarre foreground and benign background has seldom been more ingeniously demonstrated than in "North by Northwest." A hotel lobby is the setting for kidnapping, the United Nations building for murder, and the stone face of Mount Rushmore for perilous pursuit. Most famously, Hitchcock even injects paranoia into a prairie setting when Thornhill (Cary Grant) is sprayed with bullets from a crop-dusting biplane. It is Hitchcock's most dazzling reversal of thriller cliché: here the dark deed takes place in bright sunlight. It is also a set-piece that is brilliantly set up by the film, establishing a hero who is the embodiment of urban man then suddenly depositing him in a setting where he is small, vulnerable and exposed. And it shows his arrival at the scene from a vantage point that subtly implies danger without revealing what it is. The crop-dusting episode is an object lesson in how to prepare and pace a suspense sequence. Apart from the technique, what makes "North by Northwest" exceptional amongst comedy thrillers is the maturity of its relationships and perceptive cynicism of its politics. The central love relationship has the kind of tensions one has observed elsewhere in Hitchcock. As in "Vertigo," the girl falls in love with the man almost out of guilt at setting him up as in "Suspicion" and "Spellbound" she makes love to a man who could be a murderer. For his part, he seems only too willing to be ensnared by a sexual siren who might be summoning him to his doom. Politically, the film also has a comment to make about the callous exploitation and abuse of individuals for minor political advantage in a deadly game of strategy, performance, bluff and double bluff. But it would be unwise to distort the emphasis of the various elements. Lots of familiar Hitchcock ingredients are bubbling in "North by Northwest": the theme of the wrong man, the precariousness of identity, the ineffectuality of the police. The ultimate effect, however, is of a dazzling and exhilarating cinematic display, the American Dream played out as potential nightmare but in broad daylight an
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Overview
While having lunch at the Plaza Hotel in New York, advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill Cary Grant has the bad luck to call for a messenger just as a page goes out for a "George Kaplan." From that moment, Thornhill finds that he has stepped into a nightmare -- he is quietly abducted by a pair of armed men out of the hotel's famous Oak Room and transported to a Long Island estate; there, he is interrogated by a mysterious man James Mason who, believing that Roger is George Kaplan, demands to know what he knows about his business and how he has come to acquire this knowledge. Roger, who knows nothing about who any of these people are, can do nothing but deny that he is Kaplan or that he knows what they're talking about. ...