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Dear Reader,
If you asked me to pick out a movie that has near-universal appeal—a movie that pretty much every sentient human old enough to sit still for two hours would enjoy from start to finish—but that also felt like it wasn’t fluff, that had real artistry to it, that you would think about after the fact…I mean, it’s not a long list. Modern Times, Singin’ in the Rain, Some Like It Hot, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Breakfast at Tiffany’s has the Mickey Rooney problem. Silence of the Lambs is too scary for some people. The Sixth Sense, maybe? Titanic? Out of Sight? Toy Story?
At the top of that list—on the Mount Rushmore, we might even say, of this kind of movie—is North by Northwest. Put another way: there is no great film I would have more confidence in audiences broadly enjoying than North by Northwest. This is Alfred Hitchcock’s best film: the most entertaining, the most influential, the most satisfying, the most fun. It is a perfect movie, from start to finish—truly flawless.
To show just one example of its influence: without this…
…there is no this:
North by Northwest invents a new genre—the modern spy thriller—and the dashing Cary Grant, wearing the same immaculate suit the entire film, more or less creates the cinematic James Bond. The film provides the template for every installment in the 007 franchise, from Dr. No to No Time to Die: dizzying title sequence; propulsive score; cool locations; ruggedly handsome, preternaturally cool, witty leading man with unusual accent who always looks like a million bucks, who can drink like a champion, and who is such a prodigious Don Juan that he seduces the bad guy’s girlfriend; gentlemanly, charismatic, rich-guy villain who lives in a cool hideout and emanates pure evil; creepy henchmen; high stakes; and, in Eva Marie Saint’s steely, sexy, understated Eve Kendall, the prototypical “Bond girl.”
Pour one out for Ms. Saint, who died this month at 102. Early in her career, she played opposite the capital-M-capital-S Movie Stars Marlon Brando and Cary Grant with aplomb—no small feat—and remains criminally underrated. I get that Hitchcock was a control freak, directing even her breathing on set. But just as the best scheme in football still requires an elite quarterback to fully realize the offense, so it takes an actress of Saint’s luminous talent to take all that noisy, distracting direction and deliver a signature performance. (If you want to know what it looks like when a pretty face with no talent and even less charisma is cast in a challenging leading role, may I present Katie Zacharia.) Hitchcock told Grant what to do, too, but no one ever mentions that with regard to his performance. Eva Marie Saint was not a “system QB.” She was a movie star in her own right.
If North by Northwest lacks the flaws that riddle Hitchcock’s other top-shelf work—the abject ridiculousness of Vertigo, the 20 minutes of mansplaining that end Psycho—it also lacks the ambitiousness. In Vertigo and Psycho and even Rear Window, Hitchcock taps into something deep and dark. In North by Northwest, his central ambitions involve shooting an action scene on Lincoln’s nose and, also, making a movie that’s boffo box office, in the way that Vertigo was not. Check and check!
My quibble with North by Northwest has always been: So what? Is it anything more than the most elegant possible form of escapism? And, if it’s “only” that: Is that not just as valuable as a work of art? Is great artistic ambition compulsory to artistic greatness? In this film, Hitchcock provides an answer: Yes, it’s okay for an artistic masterpiece to also be wildly entertaining. Those two traits are not mutually exclusive.
Even when we want to tell stories that are sad, or upsetting, or uncomfortable, the most effective means is to be entertaining. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, as the old song goes. Many years ago, I picked up William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice at a used book store. Although I’d never seen the movie, I knew what the eponymous “choice” was, and I knew that it would make for unpleasant reading. But I was curious, because: how do you write a book about that? So I cracked open the spine and dug in. And Styron’s novel is a masterclass in how to tell that kind of horrible story. The first 250 pages are compelling, delightful, and funny as hell—and all of that was designed to soften me up, to fasten my seatbelt and prepare me for the point of the exercise. I remember thinking, “Oh, shit, the bad stuff’s coming now…God damn this guy, he’s roped me in!” The titular moment is two or three paragraphs in a relatively long novel; it comes and goes so fast some readers probably miss it. Just the facts, without exposition, because what exposition is required?
But North by Northwest is not Sophie’s Choice.
If our cultural artifacts mirror our moods and our needs in the moment, what shift in the zeitgeist is North by Northwest channelling? Nineteen fifty-nine was, in retrospect, a pivotal year—the start, really, of what we now think of as “the Sixties.” Batista fled Havana, ushering in the fateful Castro period in Cuba. The Soviets put Luna 1 up near the moon, inspiring the space race. HIV emerged in the Congo. The first Barbie doll was produced, the In Cold Blood murders went down, and Buddy Holly died.
Put it all together, and what we had in ‘59 was an unwitting America hurtling towards a new and different sort of geopolitical danger. That conflict plays out in North by Northwest. James Mason’s Philip Vandamm is already in league with the Soviets, and Leo G. Carroll’s Professor, with his byzantine counterintelligence machinations, is already playing the new Great Game. (Although the film’s title is famously meaningless, the fact is, if we start in the Oak Room and head north by northwest long enough, we end up in Russia.) We don’t hear much about how exactly Eve Kendall wound up dating a veritable Bond villain, but what we are told is not unfamiliar to our post-Epstein ears.
This is a universe of spies, of deception, of the highest possible stakes—but quiet, lowkey, invisible to the naked eye, and overshadowed by the glamor of the United Nations building and the majesty of Mount Rushmore. Then, because of the Professor’s Kremlinesque “George Kaplan” ruse, along comes Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, as loud and stubborn and industrious as America itself, crashing into that meticulously constructed house of cards like history’s handsomest wrecking ball, disrupting everything. He is the American people, in ways both good and bad, and his greatest asset is his refusal to go quietly—an important lesson for our own times.
The hero of a thriller is typically an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Cary Grant is anything but ordinary, of course, but Roger Thornhill kind of is: an advertising executive, a lush, a lothario, and a mama’s boy—not at all the sort of chap a seasoned operative like Philip Vandamm would expect to be the cause of so much trouble. As he himself puts it, “I’m an advertising man, not a red herring. I’ve got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives, and several bartenders dependent on me.”
Thornhill is pulled into strong currents generated by the intelligence operatives, and much of North by Northwest involves his struggle to adjust to the rip tide. But by the end of the film, he is able to swim on his own power, and with increasing confidence. No longer being pulled along by other forces, and sick to death of the long game that he knows will get Eve Kendall killed, he’s had enough:
THORNHILL
I don’t like the games you play, Professor.PROFESSOR
War is hell, Mr. Thornhill. Even when it’s a cold one.THORNHILL
If you fellows can’t lick the Vandamms of this world without asking girls like her to bed down with them and fly away with them and probably never come back, perhaps you ought to start learning how to lose a few cold wars.PROFESSOR
I’m afraid we’re already doing that.
He’s not motivated by love of country, either—even as the Professor tries to appeal to his patriotism. Thornhill wants to thwart Vandamm for the same reason Michael Jordan wanted to beat Isiah Thomas: pure competitive spirit. Most of all, Thornhill wants to save, and therefore get, the girl. And so he does, in one of cinema’s most famous closing shots.
Because an ordinary person accepts the call to action, and refuses to succumb to the powerful, dangerous currents generated by an inertia-imprisoned federal government and an intelligence service that has become too cute by half, the Kremlin operatives are apprehended or killed—all under the stony, approving watch of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.
That’s an ending I can get behind.
ICYMI
Our guest on The Five 8 was Jen Taub.
For the media, we went with Sir Mixalot:
That’s Chunk doing the Trump voice and the animation.
For those curious, here is my original raw track:
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