North by Northwest

Cliffhanger

Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is a successful, suave and busy advertising executive. One afternoon, he meets some cronies for drinks in a hotel when he realises that he must send a message to his mother (Jessica Royce Landis). Hailing a passing waiter, he is shown into the lobby. However, that waiter had been announcing a message for another man, George Kaplan. When Thornhill walks into the lobby, he is assumed to be Kaplan by the two men who had given the waiter the original message. They hustle the protesting Thornhill into a car at gunpoint, and drive him out of town, to a large country home.

On the sign at the gate of the house is written 'Townsend', but he receives no introductions from the group of men he meets at the house. They question him for information, dismiss his protests that he is not Kaplan, and when it is obvious that Thornhill is of no use to them, they force a bottle of bourbon into him and put him behind the wheel of a car. As one of the gang starts the car (it is aimed at a cliff edge), Thornhill wakes up and manages to drive off. He is followed by the gang, and ,when he crashes the car, he is arrested by the local police for drunk driving.

,When he tries to explain his predicament, the police, his mother and his lawyer return to the Townsend residence to verify his story. However, after hearing Mrs. Townsend's version of the story, it appears that he had turned up at the Townsend's for a party, got drunk and then 'borrowed' a car to get home. There is no sign of his interrogators, and both the local police and his mother don't believe his side of the story.

Thornhill returns to the hotel, and posing as Kaplan, searches his room. He discovers that the staff in the hotel have never seen the 'real' Kaplan, so Thornhill decides to track him down himself. His first stop is the United Nations building in New York, where he finds that the 'real' Townsend is not the man he had met earlier. What's more, his wife had died years earlier, and his home should be closed up and unused. Before Thornhill can tell his own story, Townsend is struck down by a knife in the back - witnesses assume that Thornhill is the killer. Now Thornhill is on the run. His only hope is to find the real Kaplan.

Hitchcock's 1959 thriller is an exuberant and action-packed adventure which is full of humour and spectacular sequences. It incorporates a number of Hitchcock trademarks, from visual striking camera work, gallows humour, and his oft-used technique of keeping the hapless hero in the dark until the end of the movie. The scene of Thornhill escaping the UN building is a typical example - the camera is perched at the top of the towering office block which dominates the entire frame. In the distance, a tiny, solitary figure races for a bug-sized yellow dot (a taxi) and speeds away. There is a recurring image of Thornhill, as a tiny figure overwhelmed by the other elements of the scene - the scene where he is chase by the crop-dusting plane begins with an aerial shot of Thornhill as a tiny spec on a featureless, dusty plane. The films's climax takes place on Mount Rushmore, where all the human figures are dwarfed by the giant sculptures. As in many of Hitchcock's movies, a pretty blonde provides

the female interest. In this case, the blonde in question is Eve Kendall (Eve Marie Saint), who provides sanctuary for Thornhill on a train journey. She seems almost too friendly and trusting, since Thornhill is a suspected murderer. Thornhill assumes it is his charm, but Kendall is actually working with the men from the Townsend manor. It turns out that Kaplan is a fiction, a non-existent agent of a Government agency whose movements are choreographed in order to confuse the opposition. The agency knows Thornhill is innocent but does not wish to jeopardise their scheme by interfering to exonerate him. Of course, this means that Thornhill's quest to find Kaplan is doomed to failure.

Hitchcock has great fun putting Thornhill in ever more difficult situations. The spectacular chase in the cornfields has Thornhill pursued by a crop-dusting plane, armed with a machinegun as well as insecticide. He manages to escape, but his life is in danger again when he comes face-to-face with his tormentors, Vandamm (James Mason) and Leonard (Martin Landau) at an art auction, where he finds Eve in their company. Again he manages to evade them, simply by getting arrested. In fact, Thornhill is 'rescued' by the police several times when his life is in danger.

The movie is so action-packed that it is easy forget some of the holes in the plot. The whole movie hinges on the initial case of mistaken identity, even though the local police could have easily discovered Vandamm's plot if they had bothered to identify the real Townsend, or even question Thornhill's drinking buddies in the hotel. Moreover, if Vandamm really wanted to catch Thornhill, why doesn't he kidnap his mother rather than set elaborate (and ultimately unsuccessful) traps. There is also one famous scene which doesn't make any sense in light of the film's conclusion. These are minor quibbles - the plot twists are so numerous, and lead our attention in so many directions that we don't notice Hitchcock's sleight-of-hand.

Cary Grant makes an ideal leading man - he stays just the right side of tongue-in-cheek, and he excels equally in both the physical action scenes as well as in the role of a charming womaniser; his chat up lines (to Kendall) include "So how does a girl like you get to be a girl like you". He is helped by a sparkling script (co-written by Ernest Lehman and Hitchcock), whose only flaw is to neglect Kendall's role. Eve Marie Saint doesn't entirely convince as a magnetic blonde literally in bed with both sides.

Nevertheless, North by Northwest is a great, if over-the-top thriller, filmed in larger-than-life Technicolor, and it is easy to see how it has influenced many other movies since.

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

.Back to the top

.

.

© 1999 Stockholm Film Review. All Rights Reserved.