North by Northwest
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Country of origin of the director: The United Kingdom
Country of origin of the film: The United States
Release Dates:
US: July 28, 1959 (Chicago) / August 6, 1959 (New York)
Australia: July 30, 1959
Japan: September 17, 1959
France: October 21, 1959
Italy: November 27, 1959
Genre: Adventure / mystery / thriller
Running Time: 136 min
Language: English
Producer: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Screenwriter: Ernest Lehman
Composer: Bernard Herrmann
Distributor: Carlotta Films
Awards: Nominated for three Academy Awards: Film Editing / Art Direction / Original Screenplay. Won the 1960 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay.
Cast:
Cary Grant (Roger Thornhill)
Eva Marie Saint (Eve Kendall)
James Mason (Philip Vandamm)
Jessie Royce Landis (Clara Thornhill)
Leo G. Caroll (The professor)
Summary
New York City: The publicist Roger Thornhill is to meet his mother for an evening at the theatre. As he stands in a phone booth in the Plaza Hotel he is abducted by communist agents who have mistaken him for a so-called George Kaplan, a fictitious American secret agent.
Brought into a luxury mansion, he is first questioned by Philip Vandamm and his men, then drugged and almost killed. He manages to escape and tries to find the owner of the house, Lester Townsend, a United Nations diplomat. He meets the latter in the hall of the UN but Townsend is stabbed while both men are talking. Thornhill escapes and is chased by the police.
In order to find out who George Kaplan is, he boards a train to Chicago and meets Eve Kendall, an attractive woman he falls in love with and who helps him to escape the police. She turns out to be Philip Vandamm’s mistress and organises a fictitious meeting between Thornhill and George Kaplan in the Nevada desert, where Thornhill is attacked by a crop-duster plane. He miraculously escapes. He returns to Chicago where he finds out that Eve is Philip Vandamm’s mistress.
When a CIA professor reveals that Kaplan does not actually exist, that Eve actually works for the American government in order to catch Vandamm and that her life is therefore at stake, Thornhill accepts to impersonate George Kaplan. Vandamm meets with Kaplan at Mount Rushmore where the CIA party frames Kaplan’s sham murder. Vandamm discovers that Eve has betrayed him and plans to kill her. Thornhill manages to save her and after a terrible pursuit at Mount Rushmore, the police arrest Vandamm.
The film ends with Roger Thornhill and Eve Kendall going on a honeymoon trip aboard the train where they first met.
References
The title
North By Northwest is a quotation from Hamlet, Act II, scene 2: “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw...”
One of the titles Hitchcock was apparently first working on was Breathless, in a Northwesterly Direction. He must then have wanted to paraphrase Hamlet for his reference to be more obvious to everybody.
In this breathless chase from New York to Mount Rushmore - from south-east to north-west - the hero, Roger Thornhill, caught up in the midst of an unbelievably complex imbroglio, will indeed have to prove his own sanity both to others and to himself!
The film director
The actors
Cary Grant
Alexander-Archibald Leach, Cary Grant was born on January 18th, 1904 in Bristol, UK, and died on November 29th, 1986. At the age of 15, he left his family to join an entertainer’s company before performing in musicals. He first went to Broadway in 1927, then to Hollywood where he acted in his first film Blonde Venus (1932) with Marlene Dietrich. As a talented womanizer, he appeared in many successful comedies such as Bringing Up Baby by Howard Hawkes (1938) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). Before and after the Second World War Cary Grant worked with Alfred Hitchcock in several success movies such as Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955), North by Northwest (1959), giving his character a more serious substance.
Speaking of the complex plot of North by Northwest, Grant himself declared: “It’s a terrible script. We’ve already done a third of the picture and I still can’t make head or tail of it,” a sentence uttered by his character Roger Thornhill.
In 1970 he was awarded an Oscar as a tribute to his full career as an actor. Cary Grant acted in more than 70 films.
Eva Marie Saint
Born on July 4th, 1924 in Newark, New Jersey, she studied drama and won several beauty contests. Her career began on the radio and on live television. She was thirty when she played in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) with Marlon Brando. She was awarded an Oscar for this first major role. In Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), she replaced Sophia Loren who was first cast to play the role of Eve Kendall. She also performed in Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), and in Vincente Minnelli’s The Sandpiper (1965). Her career was on the decline in the 1970s. She returned to television movies but also appeared in Titanic (1996) and more recently in Superman Returns (2006).
James Mason
Born in Huddersfield, Great Britain, on May 15th, 1909, he died on July 27th 1984. He became famous to the public with director Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out in 1947. In Hollywood, he also played in Vincente Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949), East Side, West Side (1950) by M. LeRoy, Pandora (1952) by Albert Lewin, A Star is Born (1956) by George Cukor and Lolita (1962) by Stanley Kubrick.
Mason often played neurotic anti-hero characters whose obsessive self-control revealed a deep psychological wound. He excelled at showing the flaws of self-righteous characters such as a spy, a father, or an honourable academic.
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