An unserious man

#34 - ‘North by Northwest’

To watch North by Northwest in the 21st century is, first and foremost, to have a half-century of pop culture make a little bit more sense. To some extent, that is true of most of the films in this series, but it is more true of a select few on the list, and this is certainly one of them.

North by Northwest makes more sense of many cultural touchpoints. The early-stage Cold War paranoia, femme fatale, and henchmen who kill from distance with a knife and a flick of the wrist make this a James Bond boilerplate. But Bond is simply the most obvious successor heavily influenced by this film. Throughout its runtime, the mind wanders from 007 to, of course, Austin Powers, and on to Mission: Impossible. Then it goes to more esoteric locales, like Mad Men and the stylings of director Wes Anderson.

Its iconic qualities extend well beyond its own borders and deep in to many other familiar works. The stillness of the camera and the way each shot is meticulously framed is echoed by Anderson’s work. The self-righteousness and self-importance of ad man Roger Thornhill feels like a template for Don Draper.

In an odd way, the ubiquitous-seeming impact of North by Northwest - its long reach - brings you back to the film itself. This is, after all, the ultimate Alfred Hitchcock film.¹ It is, at once, its own contained story as well as being an amalgam of all of Hitchcock’s tendencies, predilections, and favored themes established over decades of work.

North by Northwest seems to contain everything Hitchcock wanted to achieve or talk about in a film. There’s a case of mistaken identity, espionage, a blonde bombshell and even a (very literal!) cliffhanger at the end. It is indulgent enough that you might spend part of it wondering if Hitchcock is deliberately f*cking with us, as if he’s gleefully and willfully veered in to self-parody.

And, you know, maybe he was. Maybe Roger Thornhill is the proof. He’s certainly the part of this, above all else, that I keep returning to because, well, he’s the worst kind of person.

Think about what we learn of Thornhill as the film unfolds. At the start, he’s so seemingly busy that he drags his poor secretary in to a taxicab so he can dictate memos and plans to her even though he’s only traveling a few blocks. In other words, he’s a lazy and arrogant big shot. After all, his big, important meeting that he’s rushing to seems to revolve mostly around midday boozing. He’s such a lush that a few scenes later, when he’s framed for drunk driving, his own mother finds it all too believable that his latest bender has run him afoul of the authorities.

Hitchcock seems to be on a singular mission in North by Northwest to have us root for his hero in spite of everything we know about him. Every new detail that emerges during the film’s runtime makes that more of a challenge

Roger Thornhill is as unserious a person as his spiritual twin Roger Sterling. He is a three-martini-lunch-loving blowhard who doesn’t deserve to be caught up in all of this, but also probably doesn’t deserve to get out of it either. Somehow he does. His most basic charm is perhaps part of it, but his slow wit also makes his escape a function of simple good luck as well.

“It’s a nice face,” says Eva Marie Saint’s Eve Kendall when she first meets Thornhill. There’s a sinister, seductive undertone to her appreciation of Cary Grant’s bone structure. She is setting him up on behalf of her bosses, of course. But there is also the literal reading of the line. Roger Thornhill does look nice, but there also isn’t much else about him upon which to comment.

The film’s most famous scene punctuates this dynamic. Bamboozled by Eve, Roger has found himself in a dusty, sun-bleached farm field, far away from glamorous Madison Avenue and even pretty far from the overnight train headed from New York to Chicago. He’s there to meet someone who is never coming and ends up ducking and dancing away from a cropduster mounted with a machine gun. Gunfire hails down upon him as he rolls around in the dirt. Eventually, he gets lucky, a gas tanker explodes, and he is able to pick himself up, dust himself off and chase after Eve again. Rest assured, when he wipes the muck from his well-tailored suit, he looks fantastic. It is a nice face, after all.

Grant is remarkable here. He is playing to and against type - simultaneously a suave dazzler and dull boor - and the thrills and suspense and multiple levels of the film only work if he is both of those things. In the end, his performance is a muse-like one, some distant cousin of the many blonde women who seem to have also brought out the best in Hitchcock.

Much as Grant was playing up to and with our expectations, the same could be said of Hitchcock with North by Northwest. He set out to make the ultimate version of his films, and so it ends up being a commentary on and parody of what it is to be a Hitchcock film by this point, toward the tail end of his illustrious career. The film’s closing moments reveal that Eve and Roger have just gotten married and then show their train steaming in to a tunnel.

There’s nothing subtle about this visual, but go ahead and try not to crack a wry smile at it as the credits roll.

1. Wikipedia tells us that Ernest Lehman, who wrote the original screenplay, intended for this to be the “Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures. Indeed, he only made seven more films after this one. One of them was Psycho, but I would argue that film was less in keeping with his overall style and work than this one.