ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S North by Northwest (1959; 136 mins.)

PRINCIPAL CAST
actor	role
Cary Grant	Roger Thornhill
Eva Marie Saint	Eve Kendall
James Mason	Phillip Vandamm
Jesse Royal Landis	Clara Thornhill
Leo G. Carroll	Professor
Martin Landau	Leonard, Vandamm's secretary
Philip Ober	Lester Townsend
Adam Williams	Valerian
Robert Ellenstein	Licht
Philip Coolidge	Dr. Cross
Ed Binns	Captain Junket
Edward Platt	Victor Larrabee
Les Tremayne	Auctioneer
Patrick McVey	Chicago Police Sergeant Flynn
Ken Lynch	Chicago Police Officer Charlie

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Producer	Alfred Hitchcock, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Associate Producer	Herbet Coleman
Director	Alfred Hitchcock
Original Scenario	Ernest Lehman
Director of Photography	Robert Burks
Production Designer	Robert Boyle
Special Photographic Effects	A. Arnold Gillespie and Lee LeBlanc
Sets	Robert Boyle, William A. Horning, Merrill Pyle, Henry Grace, and Frank McKelvey
Composer	Bernard Herrmann
Editing	George Tomasini
Title Design	Saul Bass
Sound Engineer	Frank Milton
Assistant Director	Robert Saunders

Director

Sir Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) was born and raised in England. He began his movie career in 1919, when he became an apprentice at Paramount's Famous Players-Lasky studio, designing and illustrating title cards and learning the basics of film production. In 1922, he was promoted to assistant director; in 1925, he directed his first film: The Pleasure Garden, a British-German production, made in Munich. While he was in Germany, he absorbed the style of German expressionism, which had a major influence on both the thematic and the visual elements of his films. With The Lodger (1926), the story of a family who mistakenly suspect their roomer to be Jack the Ripper, Hitchcock created the unique genre—combining thrills, suspense, sex, and humor—with which he was associated throughout his career.

Hitchcock's fifty-six films fall into two periods: those he made in England and those he made after he moved to Hollywood in 1939. The classic thrillers of the first period include The Lodger (1926), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Hitchcock's great Hollywood films—Rebecca (1940), which won an Academy Award for best picture; Notorious (1946); Strangers on a Train (1951); Rear Window (1954); Vertigo (1958); North by Northwest (1959); Psycho (1960); and The Birds (1963)—stand far above his lesser achievements: Lifeboat (1944), Stage Fright (1950), Dial M for Murder (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), Marnie (1964), and Torn Curtain (1966).

Hitchcock began producing his own movies in 1948; produced, introduced, and sometimes directed several popular American television series in the 1950s and '60s; and lent his name to television anthologies of mystery stories. He received the Academy's Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1968, was given the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1979, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1980.^[1]

art director

Robert Boyle (b. 1909) was educated to be an architect. When the Great Depression prevented him from finding steady work in that profession, he became a bit player at RKO Studios. There, he grew fascinated with how movie sets were created; realizing that his background in architecture could help him build those sets, he introduced himself to Van Nest Polglase, RKO's supervising art director. Polglase referred him to Paramount Pictures, where he was hired by Hans Dreier, the studio's supervising art director. Between 1933 and 1942, Boyle worked as a sketch artist, draftsman, and assistant art director. Architecture school proved excellent preparation for the creation of traditional and modern backgrounds for filmmaking.

Before he begins to design, Boyle studies the characters in the script, wanting to know their educations, family backgrounds, and sexual orientations. He says:

You have to know all this before you can sit down with a pencil and start to draw. At one point, it's your picture; you are the director. You can't design a film if you don't work from the director's viewpoint. It's very easy to make films that show off design. The problem is to exert some discipline. Essentially, if we are worthy of the name production designer, we are responsible for the main look of the environment of the film. My concern is for interpreting the film.^[2]

Boyle has designed eighty-five movies, serving as production designer on thirty of them and working with a range of directors that includes Douglas Sirk (Mystery Submarine, 1950), J. Lee Thompson (Cape Fear, 1962), Richard Brooks (In Cold Blood, 1967), and William Richert (Winter Kills, 1979). He was nominated for Academy Awards for art direction–set decoration for North by Northwest, Norman Jewison's Gaily, Gaily (1969) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971), and Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976). Working with Boyle on North by Northwest was Ben Carré, a French painter of scenic backdrops, who left France for Hollywood in 1912 and became famous through his work on dozens of Hollywood films, including The Wizard of Oz (1939).

title

As strange as it may seem, one of Shakespeare's most solemn plays, Hamlet, may have inspired the title one of Hitchcock's most comic thrillers, North by Northwest. In the play, some members of the Danish court think that his father's death and his mother's marriage to his uncle have driven Prince Hamlet mad. Hamlet may be faking madness, however, to trap his new stepfather, who he knows has murdered his father. "I am but mad north-north-west," he says; "when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw" (2.2.361–62). Although no north-northwest exists on the compass, this metaphor implies that Hamlet's mind is only a little out of true. In Hitchcock's film, after his visit to the house that Vandamm pretends to occupy in Glen Cove, Long Island (east of New York City), Roger Thornhill finds himself on a journey that moves northwesterly: New York City to Chicago to Rapid City, South Dakota, and finally, reversing that direction, back to New York City. One theme that emerges during this journey is the fluidity of identity.

NARRATIVE: SURPRISE, SUSPENSE, AND COMEDY

North by Northwest is a complex tale of espionage and counterespionage, mistaken identity, romantic love, and honor.^[3] Set during the cold war, it pits the United States Intelligence Agency against a group of spies who steal and export government secrets.^[4] The spies mistake Roger Thornhill for a fictitious agent, whom the Intelligence Agency has created to confuse the spies. For various reasons, including his romantic interest in Eve Kendall, who is both mistress of head spy Philip Vandamm and a double agent working for the United States, Thornhill becomes involved in a fantastic series of circumstances, so incredible that he cannot turn to the police for help. After a series of adventures, Thornhill defeats the spies and wins Eve.

This story is told swiftly and without unnecessary detail, flashbacks, or flashforwards. Although a remarkable amount of action is packed into four days and nights, the space covered—and the time needed to cover those spaces—is realistic and believable. However, such surface realism is just one force driving this plot. In his classic, book-length interview with Hitchcock, French film director François Truffaut noted that the film is "made up of a series of strange forms that follow the pattern of a nightmare," to which Hitchcock replied, "This may be due to the fact that I'm never satisfied with the ordinary. I'm ill at ease with it."^[5]

The narrative explores three options for expressing the relationships between what the protagonists know and what the audience knows. The first occurs when the audience knows exactly what the protagonists know, no more nor less; the second, when the audience knows less than the protagonists know; and the third, when the audience knows more than the protagonist knows.^[6] Through most of North by Northwest, the first option applies. But once the second option applies—when Eve Kendall shoots Roger Thornhill and we are surprised and shocked; some minutes later, we learn that this has been a faked shooting with blank bullets. The brief period between the "shooting" and the revelation that Thornhill was not harmed is the only time in the narrative that we know less than Thornhill. The third option—classic Hitchcockian suspense—operates when the camera and the audience, but not Thornhill, omnisciently observe what the Professor says to his colleagues at the U.S. Intelligence Agency.

The incongruous—that which is inappropriate or out of place—is one of the basic elements of North by Northwest's comedy. When Truffaut commented to Hitchcock that "it's obvious that the fantasy of the absurd is the key ingredient of your film-making formula," the director replied: "The fact is I practice absurdity quite religiously" (256). Hitchcock also confided, "Since you mention it, I might tell you that The New Yorker critic described that picture as 'unconsciously funny.' And yet I made North by Northwest with tongue in cheek; to me it was one big joke. When Cary Grant was on Mount Rushmore, I would have liked to put him inside Lincoln's nostril and let him have a sneezing fit" (102). Indeed, one working title of Ernest Lehman's screenplay was The Man in Lincoln's Nose, and the film is informed by that whimsical spirit. Thornhill's middle initial is O, which, as he explains, stands for "nothing." In the bathroom of a train station, a large man shaving with a straight razor watches Thornhill use Eve's tiny razor. Later, the taciturn farmer on the road says to Thornhill, "That's funny. That plane's dustin' crops where there ain't no crops." And when Thornhill and Eve struggle to evade their pursuers on the faces of Mount Rushmore, they are dressed in formal clothes—in her case, complete with gloves, handbag, and high heels.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE AND DESIGN

Hitchcock's films, major and minor, are characterized by a distinctive visual look. He instinctively understood how to tell a story on the screen and, equally important, how the audience wants to see that story told. As Orson Welles studied John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) many times in preparation for making Citizen Kane (1941), so many later filmmakers have studied Hitchcock's films almost as if they were a textbook on the theory and practice of film production.

Hitchcock used innovative camera viewpoints and movements, elaborate editing techniques, and effective soundtrack music to build and maintain suspense. A master at relating the setting of his films to their themes and at presenting a totally "closed" world on the screen, he shot most of his films in the studio, where he could have complete control. His suspense films were generally set either in a single, interior place (e.g., Rear Window and Rope) or multiple interior and exterior places (e.g., North by Northwest and Vertigo). "I'm very concerned about the authenticity of settings and furnishings," he told Truffaut. "When we can't shoot in the actual setting, I'm for taking research photographs of everything" (253). This technique proved ideal for the making of North by Northwest, because the United Nations refused permission to film in its Delegates' Lounge and the U.S. government refused permission to film on Mount Rushmore. Both locations were re-created in the MGM studios.

Perhaps because of his early training as an art director, Hitchcock used storyboards to plan the look and logistics of every shot from beginning to end.^[7] As a result, some critics have charged that he was more concerned with the design and technique of his films than with their meaning; that he thought of actors as just another element of the mise-en-scène, like the furniture or props—something to be moved around the set to "look" right but not to get in the way of the narrative; and that even his best films, while scary and satisfying, are rarely challenging emotionally or intellectually.

Robert Boyle, who served as art director on Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964), claims:

No director I've worked with knew as much about films as he did. A lot of directors I worked with knew a great deal, but they didn't have his technical skill. He was always trying to make the visual statement, and there was no such thing as a throwaway shot. Now—about working for Hitchcock— nothing makes things easier for the art director. Art Direction is by its very nature very difficult work. It is not any easier to work with Hitchcock. It is, however, extremely rewarding and instructive—but not because he preplans or cuts-in-the-camera. I find Hitch a catalyst to my own creative functioning, and on each picture I recognized again, as if for the first time, that I was working with a master. He is one of the few who really knows the materials of his craft and their effect—and he will use anything—in any combination—in any form, conventional or not—to make his statement, to tell his story. To tell the story in a way that involves his audience is his main objective and his preplanning consists in selecting those elements and techniques that will best accomplish that goal.^[8]

We can recognize a particularly close relationship among the narrative, mise-en-scène, and design of North by Northwest. The episodic nature of the plot necessitates a variety of exterior and interior settings, for example, which help establish and define who the characters are, where they come from, and what they are capable of doing. Virtually everything in the movie has been designed or choreographed to tell the story. From the opening titles, which forecast a direction that would be impossible to follow on anyone's compass, to the final shot of the train thrusting into the tunnel on its way back to New York—which Hitchcock told Truffaut was "one of the most impudent shots I ever made . . . the phallic symbol" (15)—North by Northwest is full of incidents for which there can be no realistic explanation, questions for which there are no answers. Why doesn't Thornhill step on the brake of his speeding car earlier? Why must Eve "entertain" Thornhill overnight on the train? Why, in the middle of nowhere, does the crop-dusting plane crash into a gasoline truck? How does an advertising executive transform himself, within a few days, into a proto–James Bond?

Opening Credits

North by Northwest begins with Leo the lion roaring inside the familiar MGM logo. The background, however, is an unfamiliar pale green. The logo then dissolves into a frame of the same color across which parallel lines run diagonally (and, ironically, in a northeasterly direction) from lower left to upper right. The actual titles—printed on the same diagonal—are superimposed against these lines. The names of the cast and production crew seem to hang suspended and then fall, prefiguring the final sequence on Mount Rushmore. Even the title treatment makes a playful, self-referential comment through directional arrows on the first and last letters. These graphic lines then dissolve in a photograph of the green-tinted glass facade of a skyscraper, with moving traffic reflected on its surface; the same diagonal pattern is maintained in both the lines of the windows and the direction of the traffic. The next dissolve is to several scenes of heavy pedestrian traffic in New York City—people rushing out of office buildings, down stairways, into Grand Central Station. As the sequence comes to an end, Hitchcock makes a cameo appearance as a man trying to board a Fifth Avenue bus, which shuts its door in his face.

Settings

The film's many grotesque events occur in "real-world," even recognizable settings, such as New York City's Grand Central Station, Plaza Hotel, and United Nations building; "Baywood," an estate in Glen Cove; the Glen Cove police station; the U.S. Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C.; the Twentieth Century Limited train en route from New York to Chicago; Chicago's train terminal, airport, and city streets; a prairie between Chicago and Indianapolis; and Mount Rushmore National Monument.

Let's consider a few of the settings more closely. Although the Plaza Hotel figures prominently in North by Northwest, the only shots taken there were of the exterior, the entrance by the front desk, and the lobby telephones.^[10] With several other exceptions, which we'll look at below, the rest of the film was shot at the MGM studios in Hollywood. Boyle and his team built the Plaza's rooms there and painted a perspectival image of the lobby. One of the most improbable and therefore comic settings in North by Northwest is Philip Vandamm's house adjacent to Mount Rushmore. How could anyone, no less someone like Vandamm, live in a house (with an airplane runway) on or right beside land devoted to a national monument? What it lacks in credibility, however, the house makes up for in dramatic potential. Its principal architectural feature is the way it cantilevers out over the boulders on which it is built. As Thornhill climbs around on the steel supports and rocks, he can see into and be seen from almost every room.^[11] Only a few sections of the house were actually built for the film. The rest was created with the help of a matte painting, which was photographed and combined in the laboratory with, for example, the shot of the maid closing the curtain. Indeed, the backgrounds usually were photographed and incorporated into the studio-created settings through the cinematographic technique called rear-screen projection (see chapter 4): the coastal road during Thornhill's drunken drive; the U.S. Capitol through the window of the Intelligence Agency conference room; Mount Rushmore in eerie, bright moonlight. (Ben Carré was responsible for the matte paintings of Vandamm's house and the Mount Rushmore monument.)

Perhaps the most famous scene in the film, as well as its most incongruous, takes place on the prairie somewhere between Chicago and Indianapolis, where Thornhill is pursued by a crop duster. Truffaut and Hitchcock discussed the relationship among this event, this landscape, and one of the film's themes:

F.T.: . . . Now, let's go back to the scene in the cornfield. The most appealing aspect of that sequence with the plane is that it's totally gratuitous—it's a scene that's been drained of all plausibility or even significance. Cinema, approached in this way, becomes a truly abstract art, like music. And here it's precisely that gratuity, which you're criticized for, that gives the scene all of its interest and strength. . . . How can anyone object to gratuity when it's so clearly deliberate—it's planned incongruity?...

A.H.: . . . No darkness, no pool of light, no mysterious figures in windows. Just nothing. Just bright sunshine and a blank, open countryside with barely a house or tree in which any lurking menaces could hide. (256)

In this absolutely flat, lifeless, brown landscape—first seen from on high—Thornhill's insignificance as a "hero" is clearly depicted. Fleeing for his life from an old single-engine plane armed with a machine gun, he becomes a small figure in the frame.

Thus, while the fictional world of North by Northwest appears on the surface to be realistic, its settings actually help convey the characters' predicaments and states of mind. In this regard, the film owes much to German expressionism, where inward states are reflected in outward forms. Here, "planned incongruity" not only provides thrills and fun but also thwarts our sense of the normal. Everyone lies in this world, nothing is stable, and no place is what it seems. At the happy ending, when Roger Thornhill and Eve Kendall are safely together, the train plunges as inevitably into the dark tunnel as Thornhill did into the abyss of mistaken identity at the beginning of the film.

Details

Many of the design details authentically reflect the modernist style of architecture, decor, and clothing of the 1950s: the furniture at the United Nations Headquarters, which opened in 1952; the sleek Twentieth Century Limited (whose exteriors and interiors were the work of Henry Dreyfuss, one of the great industrial designers of the twentieth century); and the equally modern architecture and furnishings of Vandamm's house. Also note the great ornamental gates of the huge Georgian mansion in Glen Cove; the elegant furnishings of Mr. Kaplan's room at the Plaza; and the luxurious, traditional decor of the public spaces and rooms at Chicago's Ambassador East, then the city's best hotel. The costumes evoke an era when men invariably wore suits and women wore full, bouffant skirts. Eve's clothes are very much of the period, the sort of expensive outfits one would expect Phillip Vandamm's mistress to have—though her makeup and hairstyle maintain a movie studio perfection that are yet another incongruity in North by Northwest's fast-paced world of espionage and murder.

for Further Reading

Adair, Gene. Alfred Hitchcock Filming Our Fears. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Allen, Richard, ed. Alfred Hitchcock Centenary Essays. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Finler, Joel W. Hitchcock in Hollywood. New York: Continuum, 1992.

Lehman, Ernest. North by Northwest. New York: Viking Press, 1972.

Millington, Richard H. "Hitchcock and American Character: The Comedy of Self-Construction in North by Northwest." In Hitchcock's America, ed. Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington, 135–54. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Smith, Susan. Hitchcock Suspense, Humour and Tone. London: British Film Institute, 2000.

Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures. New York: Doubleday, 1979.

---. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983.

Wood, Robin. Hitchcock's Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

BACK TO TOP

^[1]See Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976).

^[2]Robert Boyle, interview in Vincent LoBrotto, By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), 16.

^[3] See James Naremore, ed., North by Northwest: Alfred Hitchcock, Director (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993).

^[4] For a possible real-life source for this story, see Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, 340–42.

^[5]François Truffaut, Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 260. Further references to this work are made parenthetically in the text.

^[6]See Michael Eaton, Chinatown (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 32–35. In Film Art: An Introduction, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson state, "The plot's range of story information creates a hierarchy of knowledge, and this may vary somewhat depending on the film. At any given moment, we can ask if the viewer knows more than, less than, or as much as the characters do" (103).

^[7]His storyboard for Family Plot (1976) is reproduced in Spoto, 463–99.

^[8]Robert Boyle, qtd. in Léon Barsacq, Caligari's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design [trans. Michael Bullock], rev. ed. Elliott Stein (New York: New American Library, 1976), 199.

^[9]Bass designed the titles for two other Hitchcock films, Vertigo and Psycho. And although there is some disagreement over the nature and extent of his contribution—Hitchcock characteristically discounted any real contribution by a collaborator—Bass also played a major role in designing and storyboarding the shower sequence in Psycho (see chapter 6).

^[10]See the interview with Boyle in LoBrutto , By Design, 1–16.

^[11]Some commentators (including Boyle) say that the house was modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Fallingwater (1936–39), which cantilevers over a stream in the Pennsylvania countryside. But except for appearing to be suspended over water, the film's house bears little direct resemblance to that particular design by Wright.