North by Northwest (15.)
Directed Alfred Hitchcock. 1959.
Starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll and Martin Landau. 133 mins. Re-released to launch the BFI's Thriller: Who Can You Trust? season.
After more than thirty years spent at, or near, the top of his profession, starting in the silent era and taking him from this side of the Atlantic over to Hollywood, in the late fifties Alfred Hitchcock did something truly remarkable – he took his career to a whole different level. He made the three films which would cement his reputation as one of the great film artists, as well as shape the course of western culture for the next half-century. Vertigo. North By Northwest. Psycho. With these three films, Hitchcock was setting the world to wrong.
Of course, NbN is by far the most easygoing of that trilogy, a lighthearted chase thriller and romance, in which an innocent advertising executive (if such a thing exists) Roger O Thornhill, Grant, finds himself mistaken for a spy who doesn't exist, gets framed for murder, goes on the run to avoid being killed by an enemy spy ring and falls in love with Eve Marie Saint. It is a landmark film, the bar by which all future Hollywood entertainment would be judged. So smooth, so effortless, it's the world reshaped in Grant's image. Never has a man on the run and in fear for his life seemed so comfortable, so relaxed, so utterly at home.
There was nothing in NbN that audiences hadn't seen before, but I don't think there were many Hollywood entertainments previous to this that had the routine down as slick as this. NbN is often acclaimed as the precursor of the Bond films, but it is truer to say that it is the blueprint for the modern blockbuster: the pace is pretty pedestrian by today's standards but it established the idea that films could be made up of a series of “good bits,” even if those good bits aren't really relevant. It isn't the first film where the plot doesn't make much sense, but it is the first to make that a virtue. Its legacy is as much Transformers: The Last Knight as it is 007.
(Grant was the first choice for Bond. This seems unthinkable now, but he would've been fantastic. I say that because he was fantastic in most everything he did and I think he could have done suave and witty to degrees Connery and Moore could only fantasize about. Could he have done cold-blooded? I'm sure that somewhere in his journey from a broken home in Bristol to the Hollywood Hills, that was a resource he picked up. We are lucky that it didn't happen though. He'd have retired after three films at most and there's no way he could've been adequately replaced and that would've been the end of Bond.)
North by Northwest's is a landmark movie and its pre-eminence and brilliance are unquestionable, so I'm going to round this piece out with a few minor quibbles.
Almost every part of the plot is advanced by coincidence, chance encounters, and bits that don't make any sense at all. Let's take the one of the film's most celebrated sequence: the crop duster scene. It came about because Hitch wanted to shoot something where a man stands alone in a completely deserted landscape with nothing visible for 360 degrees around him. The result is daring and remarkable and iconic, but after admiring it you may wonder about the contrivances needed to bring it about. So how come the villains just happened to be on the same train as Grant as he heads out of New York? Why did they arrange to send him out to the wilderness, when they could've just thrown him off the train? How did they have access to a crop duster plane in Chicago when their base of operation was the other side of the country? And how were they going to kill him with a crop duster plane anyway?
Hitchcock's answer to this was “logic is the enemy of imagination,” which is fine if your Hitchcock, but a license to wreak havoc if you are Michael Bay or Brian De Palma.
I wouldn't dispute that this is an absolute classic but not everything has survived the test of time. Some of Ernest Lehman's witty, saucy repartee now sound like Sid James Carry On lines. An early scene where the baddies try to stage Thornhill's death by having him down a bottle of bourbon and putting him behind the wheel of a car is particularly bad, a flurry of unconvincing back projection and risible drunk acting by Grant. The ineptness of the scene is emphasised by setting it to the main theme of Bernard Herrmann's score. It thunders away with little relevance to events on screen.
Herrmann's score is absolutely majestic. In the weeks before seeing this it was rattling around my head, drumming up anticipation to dangerous levels. But, great as that main theme is, it is something of a blunt instrument. There is a gentle love theme, but other than that it is unrelenting and can overwhelm events on the screen.
In his book Adventures In The Screen Trade, (or maybe Which Lie Did I Tell?) William Goldman celebrates the concision of the finale of Ernest Lehman's script, how it resolves everything – getting the protagonists from extreme peril to happy ending – with just 50 seconds remaining. Which is impressive, but however elegant its brevity, it does feel a little bit like a cop-out. It isn't as horrible as the corresponding few seconds in Vertigo, which are a horrible betrayal, but it does seem like a flippant, even facetious way to reward a viewer for over two hours of their time.
Directed Alfred Hitchcock. 1959.
Starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll and Martin Landau. 133 mins. Re-released to launch the BFI's Thriller: Who Can You Trust? season.
After more than thirty years spent at, or near, the top of his profession, starting in the silent era and taking him from this side of the Atlantic over to Hollywood, in the late fifties Alfred Hitchcock did something truly remarkable – he took his career to a whole different level. He made the three films which would cement his reputation as one of the great film artists, as well as shape the course of western culture for the next half-century. Vertigo. North By Northwest. Psycho. With these three films, Hitchcock was setting the world to wrong.
Of course, NbN is by far the most easygoing of that trilogy, a lighthearted chase thriller and romance, in which an innocent advertising executive (if such a thing exists) Roger O Thornhill, Grant, finds himself mistaken for a spy who doesn't exist, gets framed for murder, goes on the run to avoid being killed by an enemy spy ring and falls in love with Eve Marie Saint. It is a landmark film, the bar by which all future Hollywood entertainment would be judged. So smooth, so effortless, it's the world reshaped in Grant's image. Never has a man on the run and in fear for his life seemed so comfortable, so relaxed, so utterly at home.
There was nothing in NbN that audiences hadn't seen before, but I don't think there were many Hollywood entertainments previous to this that had the routine down as slick as this. NbN is often acclaimed as the precursor of the Bond films, but it is truer to say that it is the blueprint for the modern blockbuster: the pace is pretty pedestrian by today's standards but it established the idea that films could be made up of a series of “good bits,” even if those good bits aren't really relevant. It isn't the first film where the plot doesn't make much sense, but it is the first to make that a virtue. Its legacy is as much Transformers: The Last Knight as it is 007.
(Grant was the first choice for Bond. This seems unthinkable now, but he would've been fantastic. I say that because he was fantastic in most everything he did and I think he could have done suave and witty to degrees Connery and Moore could only fantasize about. Could he have done cold-blooded? I'm sure that somewhere in his journey from a broken home in Bristol to the Hollywood Hills, that was a resource he picked up. We are lucky that it didn't happen though. He'd have retired after three films at most and there's no way he could've been adequately replaced and that would've been the end of Bond.)
North by Northwest's is a landmark movie and its pre-eminence and brilliance are unquestionable, so I'm going to round this piece out with a few minor quibbles.
Almost every part of the plot is advanced by coincidence, chance encounters, and bits that don't make any sense at all. Let's take the one of the film's most celebrated sequence: the crop duster scene. It came about because Hitch wanted to shoot something where a man stands alone in a completely deserted landscape with nothing visible for 360 degrees around him. The result is daring and remarkable and iconic, but after admiring it you may wonder about the contrivances needed to bring it about. So how come the villains just happened to be on the same train as Grant as he heads out of New York? Why did they arrange to send him out to the wilderness, when they could've just thrown him off the train? How did they have access to a crop duster plane in Chicago when their base of operation was the other side of the country? And how were they going to kill him with a crop duster plane anyway?
Hitchcock's answer to this was “logic is the enemy of imagination,” which is fine if your Hitchcock, but a license to wreak havoc if you are Michael Bay or Brian De Palma.
I wouldn't dispute that this is an absolute classic but not everything has survived the test of time. Some of Ernest Lehman's witty, saucy repartee now sound like Sid James Carry On lines. An early scene where the baddies try to stage Thornhill's death by having him down a bottle of bourbon and putting him behind the wheel of a car is particularly bad, a flurry of unconvincing back projection and risible drunk acting by Grant. The ineptness of the scene is emphasised by setting it to the main theme of Bernard Herrmann's score. It thunders away with little relevance to events on screen.
Herrmann's score is absolutely majestic. In the weeks before seeing this it was rattling around my head, drumming up anticipation to dangerous levels. But, great as that main theme is, it is something of a blunt instrument. There is a gentle love theme, but other than that it is unrelenting and can overwhelm events on the screen.
In his book Adventures In The Screen Trade, (or maybe Which Lie Did I Tell?) William Goldman celebrates the concision of the finale of Ernest Lehman's script, how it resolves everything – getting the protagonists from extreme peril to happy ending – with just 50 seconds remaining. Which is impressive, but however elegant its brevity, it does feel a little bit like a cop-out. It isn't as horrible as the corresponding few seconds in Vertigo, which are a horrible betrayal, but it does seem like a flippant, even facetious way to reward a viewer for over two hours of their time.
