North by Northwest (1959)

 

North by Northwest (1959) is regularly included as one of the great films of Alfred Hitchcock. Given the detailed critical appraisal handed to Vertigo and Rear Window, I expected something far more dark than this. Instead, I noticed the jokes (including the hospital patient whose room Grant accidentally enters, and who immediately cries out "Don't go!") 

My immediate motivation for watching this film (I had seen it before, but so long ago that I had forgotten it) was to explore the role of Cary Grant. David Thompson recently reviewed two biographies of Grant, and how both of them attempted to get to the bottom of Grant’s magic. I read with fascination about how Grant’s mother was incarcerated in an asylum for over 20 years, with what horrific effect for him I can hardly imagine. I then watched a documentary, Becoming Cary Grant, by Mark Kidel, which revealed some more interesting facts – but at the same time clothed this documentary in an annoying cod-psychoanalytic tone that was more simplistic than Hollwood in the 40s and 50s, suggesting that LSD gave Grant some insight he had been lacking, and had several shots of a stand-in playing Grant on the couch with his analyst. 

At this point, I thought, let’s go back to Grant himself. Let’s see again one of his  quintessential performances. North by Northwest  is seen as one of Grant’s best performances. After watching the film, read the relevant section of Hitchcock by Truffaut, Thompson on North by Northwest, as well as Robin Wood  (Hitchcock’s Films, 1965).  Armed with all this background, what did I make of it?

This is indeed, as Thompson claims, more in the tradition of the Hollywood screwball comedy than a thriller. Just as Jacques Lourcelles in the Laffont Encyclopedia of Cinema states, the film is a masterclass in presenting life-threatening danger right alongside humour, much of it self-deprecating, constantly setting up suspense and then piercing it with humour, often suggesting that Grant is not the hero he would like to be. 

2.      Wood compares North by Northwest with Goldfinger, and claims that NBN is a greater film because of its moral stance. That sounds like someone who attended lectures by Leavis (as Wood did), but I don’t think it is a valid distinction between the figure of James Bond and Roger O. Thornhill (the character played by Grant). James Bond films never include a role for James Bond’s mother. If there is a moral progress in this film, you could say it is moral progress shared by many other knockabout comedies – and the progress is in fact questionable (see below).

3.      For me, on seeing the film a second time, the least effective scenes were the most famous: the attack by a crop-dusting plane, and the final sequence on Mount Rushmore. Why were these scenes so ineffective? Partly because Grant, like Bond, cannot die. His persona does not include dying. But perhaps more fundamentally, these are the only two scences in the film where the humour, so well linked by Hitchcock, is less apparent. For a moment, Hitchcock concentrates on the action, and pure action is not his strongpoint.

4.      Nor is heroic action Grant’s strongpoint. Grant is great at one-liners, looks wonderful in a suit, but starts to lose his charisma when in a situation of true jeopardy. Insecurity, yes, self-deprecation, yes, but expressing fear, or looking convincing in a stage fight is not really what he does.

5.      In Wood’s view, Grant through the film moves towards a “proper” relationship with women: from being married twice (he states they both divorced him) to accepting a “mature” love affair. The problem with this view is that Eva Marie Saint (Eve Kendall) represents so many conflicting viewpoints at the same time in the film. She is the sexy, inviting woman on the train; the cold and calculating temptress who will spend the night with Grant just so she can send him to a certain death in the interest of her mission; but the implications of these attitudes leave the scriptwriter with too many loose ends. You can’t commit your life to someone who sent you to your death a couple of scenes ago.

There are also questions about Eve Kendall’s morality. How did she become the mistress of a spy? This predates her recruitment by the US authorities, so presumably it was a conscious decision, but she describes it flippantly as

“I had a spare evening, so I decided to fall in love”? Such talk worked when flirting with Grant, but makes her judgement rather suspect when she falls for one of the most evil people on the planet. With such knowledge, could Grant ever really be happy? Would he not suspect her to the end of his days?

6.      And what about Leo Carroll, usually the figure of authority in so many English films, stating in his very appearance that he is willing to let Grant go to his death in the interest of security? Why, as Grant points out, is he willing to prostitute Eve Kendall for the same end? Doesn’t this suggest a lack of morality, rather than a moral focus?

7.       And why doesn’t anyone notice that Martin Landau is depicted as the utterly villainous homosexual, who knows things because of his “womanly intuition”? Such a line would be excised from any film made today.

No, this film does not have moral gravity, at least, no more than many screwball comedies. The “secrets” are so vague we are never told what they are. The villains are stagy. No, for me, NBN remains memorable as (a) the US remake of The 39 Steps, and none the worse for that.  I would say the achievement of the film is Grant moving from shallow and irresponsible (and dishonest) to becoming responsible, but without losing his self-deprecating humour. He is the man you most want to go to bed with – and there would be plenty of laughs along the way.  

 One final comment in its favour: Grant made this film when he was 55? Yet Hitchcock managed the great feat of making Grant look at least ten years younger, and still sexually alluring. A few years later, in Charade (1963), he looked like an OAP in the wrong place alongside a young heroine. Here, he succeeds brilliantly. Perhaps that is the mark of a great director: he maintained the image of Grant as the laid-back, wise-cracking man we would all like to be (even if we are all held back, like Thornhill, by our mothers).