Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest opens with a waiter calling out a name that belongs to no one. That is the whole engine of the film in a single gesture. Roger Thornhill, a New York advertising man, answers to a page meant for George Kaplan, and two well-dressed men take him for a spy who does not exist. From there, Hitchcock runs Cary Grant across the United States for 137 minutes.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
The Oak Room Mistake
The setup is a clean case of mistaken identity. Thornhill is kidnapped and brought to the Glen Cove estate of Lester Townsend, interrogated, then staged into a drunk-driving crash he survives. The police do not believe him. His mother does not believe him. He goes to the United Nations to find Townsend and watches a thug throw a knife into the diplomat’s back; the photograph of Thornhill grabbing at the blade makes him a murderer in the eyes of the law.
What lifts this above a chase picture is the machinery underneath. The “United States Intelligence Agency” invented Kaplan as a decoy, and its chief, the Professor, refuses to rescue Thornhill for fear of compromising the operation. The man being hunted is collateral by design.
Eve Kendall and the Crop Duster
On the 20th Century Limited, Thornhill meets Eve Kendall, who hides him in her stateroom’s upper berth and helps him slip a police dragnet. She says she has arranged a meeting with Kaplan at a rural Indiana bus stop. He arrives and a crop duster armed with a machine gun comes down at him.
The sequence works because Hitchcock withholds everything: no Kaplan, no ally, no ground. Eva Marie Saint plays Kendall with a cool that reads as both romance and threat. James Mason’s Phillip Vandamm gives the film a villain whose menace is entirely in his manners.
The craft holds up:
- Bernard Herrmann’s score, one of several Hitchcock collaborations.
- Saul Bass’s opening titles, the first extended use of kinetic typography in film credits.
- Hitchcock’s cameo, a bus door slammed in his face as his credit appears.
A Decoy Worth Keeping
Released July 1, 1959, North by Northwest topped the U.S. box office for seven straight weeks and drew three Academy Awards nominations. Hitchcock took the Silver Shell for Best Director at San Sebastián. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1995, calling it culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
The casting has its own small legend. Saint’s mother reminded her that Hitchcock favored women in beige clothing and white gloves; Saint wore the combination to their second meeting and credited it with winning the part, over MGM’s preference for Cyd Charisse. Hitchcock went to a performance of Middle of the Night to watch Edward G. Robinson, came away impressed by Martin Landau, and asked to meet him at MGM. There, looking over the project, Hitchcock turned to Landau and said, “You’re now Leonard.”
None of that would matter if the film did not move. It does. Lehman’s script was built to be the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures, and the chase still carries the weight of that ambition.
9.8 of 10.
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