North by Northwest (1959)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

North by Northwest (1959) – A. Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was at the top of his game at the end of the 1950s (he made Vertigo, this film, and then Psycho and The Birds).  You can see his themes very clearly – this is a mistaken identity picture and, similar to The Wrong Man (1956), a picture in which a man is wanted for a crime that he didn’t commit (running from both the police and the villains).  Cary Grant is that man and in his later years he has transmogrified under Hitch’s watch from a somewhat sinister character (Suspicion, 1941) to an ambiguous one (Notorious, 1946; To Catch a Thief, 1955) to a lovable buffoon caught in a complex web that he can’t begin to understand (NxNW). Complexity is necessary because the film is also an espionage flick and the MacGuffin is some microfilm that chief baddie James Mason is seeking to take out of the country.  Hitch builds very carefully on his earlier work – instead of the hero being chased up the Statue of Liberty (Saboteur, 1942), we find him strung out on Mount Rushmore’s iconic faces. Hitch injects a fair dose of humour and along with the usual air of artificiality (studio sets, art direction), this distracts from the true horror of Grant’s position. Having seen the film multiple times adds to this problem – you really need to work hard to imagine what it would be like to be suddenly kidnapped by thugs and accused of being someone else, a presumed spy.  Why Grant (or Roger O. Thornhill, I mean) allows himself to be lured/confused by Eva Marie Saint’s femme fatale is hard to say but perhaps any friendly face in a storm is a likely choice by someone in his confused state.  This is a minor quibble because Hitch’s goal here seems to be less an investigation of deeper serious themes (as in The Wrong Man or Vertigo, 1958) and more a demonstration of the way that film craft can be used to create a masterful thriller.  He succeeds!