Movie: North by Northwest

[amedia]

We added this to our Netflix queue and watched it a few days ago because TODS began reading an interesting article about it in an issue of Civilization that we retrieved while cleaning the garage. He stopped reading the article out of a suspicion (which turned out to be well-founded) that it might contain spoilers. After we watched the movie, though, we both read the whole article and had a really good time discussing it. It was a fun movie in itself, too.

I found a copy of the article on a Russian website; I've pasted it in below. Beware - it does contain spoilers

Section: FRONT ROW CENTER


THE GENIUS OF PURE EFFECT
IN 1952, THE BRITISH FILM MAGAZINE Sight and Sound asked a group of noted critics and directors to pick the 10 greatest films of all time. The exercise has since been repeated at decade--long intervals, and to compare the five lists published so far is to receive a priceless lesson in the evolution of taste. Some films appear regularly (Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin made all five lists), others only fleetingly (Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema appeared in ninth place in 1962, never to be seen again). About certain films, the consensus is clear: Citizen Kane, which failed to make the first list, shot to the top in 1962 and has been there ever since.

Yet the ebb and flow of fashion are no less evident: Ingmar Bergman showed up only in 1972, Alfred Hitchcock in 1982 and 1992.

Hitchcock's belated entry into the pantheon--three years after his death and 20 years after his last important film, The Birds, was made--is among the more revealing aspects of the Canon According to Sight and Sound. For years, the maker of Psycho was generally regarded as a purveyor of cynical shockers unworthy of serious critical consideration. His colleagues, of course, knew him to be a consummate craftsman, but even they seem to have distrusted his artistry. How could a director whose movies were so blatantly lacking in what the U.S. Supreme Court used to call "redeeming social value" possibly belong in the same class as Bergman and Renoir? And how could anyone take seriously the rotund jokester who exhaled "Goooodeeeeeve-ning" each week on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, poking fun at himself (and his sponsors) to the mockmacabre accompaniment of Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette"?

Today, Hitchcock is accepted by the cultural arbiters as a great filmmaker, but the terms of his acceptance are narrowly framed: Vertigo is the only Hitchcock film to have made Sight and Sound's top-10 list. Granted, Vertigo is a marvel and surely one of his personal best--but why not North by Northwest, regarded by most Hitchcock buffs as a work of comparable stature? The two films, after all, sum up the two sides of his creative personality: James Stewart, the desperate lover of Vertigo, is perfectly balanced by Cary Grant, the supremely self-confident gentin-a-jam around whom the plot of North by Northwest madly swirls. Both films are technically dazzling; both have masterly scripts; both were scored by Bernard Herrmann, the film composer's film composer. So what makes Vertigo the classic and North by Northwest the commercial?

The answer is, alas, all too simple: North by Northwest is funny, and most critics with any pretensions to intellectual grandeur don't like funny movies. Or, rather, they don't trust funny movies. Take another look at those Sight and Sound lists and you'll notice that except for Buster Keaton's The General and Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, The Gold Rush and Modern Times, all sanctified by their silence, the only Hollywood comedy ever to have been anointed is Singin' in the Rain, which got the nod in 1982 but predictably failed to make the cut the next time around.

I sometimes wonder whether the reluctance of film professionals to acknowledge the artistic seriousness of comedy has something to do with the fact that their medium, popular though it is, is still not fully accepted as coequal with what highbrows persist in referring to as the "legitimate" theater. (Obviously, they haven't been to Broadway lately.) As has recently been pointed out by Roger Ebert, there is no Pulitzer Prize for film, and the Nobel Prize for literature, although it has gone to playwrights often enough, has yet to be awarded to a full-time filmmaker. Could it be that the men and women who make the movies suffer from a collective inferiority complex? Could that be why they insist on awarding Best Picture Oscars to such bloated truckloads of pompous rubbish as Gandhi and Dances With Wolves?

Certainly this determined resistance to comedy has something to do with the fact that North by Northwest, which is Alfred Hitchcock's finest and most characteristic movie, has yet to be widely recognized as such. Even those Hitchcock scholars who claim to like it feel obliged to swaddle their careful praise in a thick blanket of symbol snuffling: Donald Spoto's The Art of Alfred Hitchcock in which just 12 pages are devoted to North by Northwest. while Vertigo gets 37 reassures the anxious reader that "it leavens the gravest concerns with a spiky and mature wit. ... Never has the entire hierarchy of unprincipled political expediency been so ruthlessly dissected."

The only truly illuminating thing I've ever read about North by Northwest is a 1970 essay by the late Charles Thomas Samuels, who spoke appreciatively of its "contentless virtuosity. ... Admiring interviewers seeking to pluck out the secret of Hitchcock's meaning forget that the secret is the absence of meaning, the absolute identification of meaning with effect." That's exactly right, and it is for this reason that North by Northwest, which turns 40 this year, has stayed as fresh as this morning's paint. Ernest Lehman, who wrote the script, later recalled pitching it to Hitchcock: "One day I said, `I want to do a Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures, that's the only kind of picture I want to do, Hitch.' And by that I meant a movie-movie--with glamour, wit, excitement, movement, big scenes, a large canvas, innocent bystander caught up in great derring-do, in the Hitchcock manner." To which the great man wistfully replied, "I've always wanted to do a chase sequence across the faces of Mount Rus more." And so off they went, unencumbered by the faintest whiff of social consciousness, in search of thrills-and, just as important, laughs.

Nothing about North by Northwest is so memorable as its high-spirited humor, which starts with the casting of Cary Grant as Roger O. Thornhill, the suave advertising executive who ends up dangling from George Washington's left nostril. James Stewart had wanted to play the part, but Hitchcock knew he wasn't right for it and stalled until Stewart had to report for work on Bell, Book and Candle, making it possible to hire Grant without hurt feelings. Seen in retrospect, Grant was the only possible choice, for his urbane presence is what gives the movie its special tone: Even when he's dodging a crop duster piloted by gun-toting Commie spies, you know he's going to come out looking like a freshly pressed Brooks Brothers suit.

Therein lies the enduring appeal of North by Northwest. Although it pretends to be about the Cold War, it's really about excitement, pure and simple: It contains no more "content" than a roller-coaster ride. This is what Hitchcock meant when, midway through location shooting in New York, he said to Lehman, "Ernie, do you realize what we're doing in this picture? The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment we play this note on them and get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react that way. And someday we won't even have to make a movie--there'll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we'll just press different buttons and they'll go `ooooh' and `aaaah' and we'll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won't that be wonderful?"

The only trouble with this fantasy of Hitchcock's is that it's come true, more or less. I have a theory that North by Northwest is the inspiration, directly or not, for the decerebrate big-budget thrillers that blight the movie screens of America each summer. From Die Hard to Speed to Con Air, they're all North by Northwest, only dumbed down, larded with four-letter words and ruthlessly stripped of charm and wit. We started out with Cary Grant and ended up with Keanu Reeves. Yet it can hardly be denied that the first led to the second, for mindless thrills, be they cheap or costly, are still mindless thrills.

This is why any avowal of Hitchcock's greatness must be followed by an asterisk. The trouble with Hitch isn't that he is a comedian, but that his comedy is less black than blank. He avoids the jungle of politics by fleeing into the desert of nihilism, and while we gladly follow him there, there is no nourishment in his cold laughter, and never any tears. True comedy is different: Each time I watch The Rules of the Game, or listen to Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, I'm reminded that there are certain harsh truths about human nature that can only be spoken with a smile.

But there are many types of greatness, and Hitchcock's kind, idiosyncratic though it is, makes the cut with room to spare. His best films are as watchable today as they were a half-century ago and speak as directly to case-hardened survivors of the Keanu Generation as they do to graying baby boomers like me. I recently invited a 23-year-old movie buff, raised on explosion-of-the-month flicks and fast-moving indie features, to watch North by Northwest with me; she'd never seen it, and I wondered if Hitchcock's carefully calculated pacing would strike her as arthritic. Not a chance. She watched raptly as Cary Grant slithered drunkenly along the edge of a Long Island cliff, choked on clouds of DDT in a deserted prairie cornfield and made out with Eva Marie Saint on the 20th-Century Limited (with kissing like that, who needs nude scenes?). "Cool!" she said at the end. "That is one totally cool movie." And so it is, and ever shall be.


~~~~~~~~

By Terry Teachout

TODS and I disagreed with some of this analysis, although we found it interesting. In particular, if the author's second main point is right - that NXNW is a slick, glossy package without content whose primary purpose is merely to manipulate the audience's reactions, then the first main point - that it belongs on lists of the Best Movies Evar - appears suspect.

Comments

[bulleteyes.livejournal.com]

It is true the entire film was made because Hitch wanted to do a chase scene down Mt. Rushmore. He had a known obsession with national monuments and frigid appearing, beautiful blondes.

At the time this film was made the censors timed how long people kissed in a film scene. Hitchcock constructed the kissing scene with Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant specifically so they would kiss the alloted amount of time, their lips would barely part due to the moving of the train and they would then kiss again, and so forth.

He made it a game to find ways to stretch or break all censorship rules.

As sick as Psycho was considered it took the censors longer to see the true deviancy he disguised in Vertigo. This delighted him to no end.

[amedia.livejournal.com]

Now I *really* have to see Vertigo! ;-)

Very interesting detail about the kissing scene!!!

NXNW

[rh-andi.livejournal.com]

First things first - only one thing need to be said about this film: Cary Grant.

Second - you and TODS (in essence) said: "In particular, if the author's second main point is right - that NXNW is a slick, glossy package without content whose primary purpose is merely to manipulate the audience's reactions, then the first main point - that it belongs on lists of the Best Movies Evar - appears suspect."

This raises the question of - what is a good movie? What is the purpose of a film in the first place, except to entertain and "manipulate" the audience? It's not a documentary, there to educate. It's a step out of reality, a roller-coaster ride in some cases (like this, like Star Wars IV, etc.), it's a chance to put your own life aside and be somewhere/someone else....is that not a good movie? Are we talking story excellence, technical excellence, or the ability to suspend disbelief? I love Grant's "Charade" - but, even with a twist-and-turn storyline, is it a better or not as good movie as NXNW?

It's kinda like asking - "what is art?"

Re: NXNW

[amedia.livejournal.com]

It's kinda like asking - "what is art?"

It is, isn't it? We talked about that, too. :-) The problem with saying that audience manipulation is what's most important is that that's exactly what some contemporary artists believe, so they create art designed to arouse strong reactions, such as disgust or anger or revulsion, and if people are disgusted or angered or revolted by it (e.g. "Piss Christ," the crucifix in a jar of urine) then the artwork is considered a success.

There's got to be *some* other criterion or criteria, but I'm not enough of an expert in the field to say what it should be.