North by Northwest is a 1959 MGM thriller by Alfred Hitchcock and is generally considered one of his best works. The film stars Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll, and Martin Landau. The screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures"[1]. It is one of several Hitchcock movies with a film score by Bernard Herrmann. The film also features a famous title sequence by the graphic designer Saul Bass.
Plot Description
A Manhattan advertising man, Roger O. Thornhill (played by Cary Grant), is mistaken for a government agent and pursued by spies who want to kill him. Thornhill is framed for murder and forced to elude the police as well as the secret agents. The film has several plot twists and a sly sense of humor, as well as a number of famous scenes, including one in which Grant''s character is chased by a crop duster, and another in which Grant and leading lady Eva Marie Saint clamber over the faces of Mount Rushmore in an attempt to evade their enemies. [top]
Critics' Opinions
Alfred Hitchcock planned the film as a change of pace after his dark romantic thriller Vertigo a year earlier. In an interview with François Truffaut ("Hitchcock / Truffaut"), Hitchcock said that he wanted to do something fun, light-hearted, and generally free of the symbolism permeating his other movies. Hitchcock, however, was not above inserting a Freudian joke as the last shot (which, notably, made it past contemporary censors). Despite its frothy appearance, the movie carries a number of underlying themes, the most important being that of theater and play-acting, wherein everyone is playing a part; no one is who they seem; and identity is in flux. This is reflected by Thornhill''s line: "The only performance that will satisfy you is when I play dead."
Grant was distressed with the way the plot seemed to wander aimlessly, and he actually approached Hitchcock to complain about the script. "I can''t make heads or tails of it," he said, without realizing that he was quoting the very words he would speak when playing the role of Thornhill. In fact, even the title North by Northwest refers to a compass direction that does not exist (the correct term is "North-northwest"), thereby adding to the fantasy of the film, as Hitchcock noted in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in 1963. (The title does make sense in reference to when Thornhill travels north via Northwest Airlines.)
The plot of this film is one of the purer versions of Alfred Hitchcock''s idea of the "McGuffin", the thing that everyone in the movie is going for, but in reality could be anything at all and which serves no real purpose. In North by Northwest, the spies are obviously going after Thornhill for some purpose or object, but it''s never made clear. Even after the spies have been thwarted, it''s still not made explicit what they wanted from him.
There are similarities between this movie and Hitchcock''s earlier film Saboteur (1942), whose final scene on top of the Statue of Liberty foreshadows the Mount Rushmore scene in the later film. In fact, North by Northwest can be seen as the last and best in a long line of "wrong man" films that Hitchcock made according to the pattern he established in The 39 Steps (1935).
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