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I have always been very concerned about my grades in school – I always did my best, and never passed up an easy A when it was available. I tell you this because the last time I watched an Alfred Hitchcock film, I took an F for that project rather than finish watching the film. That film was The Birds. Yesterday I attempted to watch another (my second!) Hitchcock film: North by Northwest. I hoped that my enduring love for Cary Grant would help me get through the film. Please don’t get me wrong – Hitchcock is a brilliant director, but I have never done well with horror films of any kind.
Guess what? Hitchcock doesn't only do horror films! North by Northwest is listed on IMDB as an Action/Adventure/Mystery/Thriller. Add in a dash of romance, and I think that about covers it. The film was released in 1959, and stars Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint (On the Waterfront, and, for my more-recent-movie-watchers, Martha Kent in Superman Returns), and James Mason (A Star is Born, among many others). The film is, of course, directed by Alfred Hitchcock who needs no context.
The movie starts with Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) dictating several tasks and memos to his secretary. Thornhill is an advertising man, and says off-handedly to his secretary, "Ah, Maggie, in the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only the expedient exaggeration.” Being in the world of advertising myself, I found this quote particularly amusing. At any rate, when meeting some business associates for drinks, he gets kidnapped by two men, and dragged off to a house that he supposes belongs to Lester Townsend, a UN ambassador. The men take him inside where he meets another man, who accuses him of being George Kaplan (who we find out later is a nonexistent secret agent for the U.S. government), proceeds to forcibly get him drunk, and then attempts to run him off the road. These men are never completely explained, but one determines that they are spies, presumably for the Soviet Union.
As you can see from this initial description, Thornhill suffers from being at all the wrong places at ALL the wrong times.
Thornhill does not die in this incident, but attempts to find Townsend. Once Thornhill finds him, Townsend is killed just at the point of explaining what might be going on - stabbed fatally in the back by a throwing knife. Pursued on one end by the spies as George Kaplan, and on the other end by the cops as Roger Thornhill for the murder of Townsend, Thornhill is forced to run cross-country to get away from them all. On a train, he meets and is seduced by a lovely lady named Eve (Saint), who we eventually discover is a double agent - as an informer for the U.S. government. Their passionate affair almost exposes her to the spies, and Eve and Thornhill must playact a scene where she "kills" him using a fake gun. Eve is still found out by the spies, which leads to a fearful chase scene over the faces of Mt. Rushmore, in which the actors do an excellent job of looking like they're about to fall to their death. I'll leave the ending for you to discover.
A few notes:
Hitchcock is seen in the film briefly just after his director credit, just barely missing a bus. I could never miss that profile, since I did watch quite a few episodes of "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" – that scared me half to death.
The interesting thing about Cary Grant is that he never plays anyone but Cary Grant – same wit, same charm, same yummy mid-Atlantic accent. A wonderful character, but he doesn’t ever really show a breadth of acting, although he does a lovely job of acting piss drunk in this film.
I have not been able to discover why the film is called North by Northwest. They do travel on Northwest Airlines at one point during the film, but they travel west. If anyone knows, feel free to enlighten me in the comments section!
All in all, this is an interesting movie that I think I would have enjoyed more had I not been bracing myself for something horrifying to happen. I have obviously deprived myself of the entire Hitchcock repertoire for one bad experience. I'll have to delve into more. Perhaps it's even time to try watching The Birds again.
Nah.
