North by Northwest (1959)

I've always said that my favorite film from Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock was his voyeurism drama Rear Window (1954). Then I graduated to loving Shadow of a Doubt (1943), doubtless because I was a budding Joseph Cotten fan at the time. This spring I had the opportunity to re-view Hitch's 1960 masterpiece Psycho and declared it my favorite.

Now that I've had the pleasure of finally seeing the master chase film North by Northwest, I'm reconsidering my list. I'm contemplating throwing it out altogether due to the sheer impossibility of choosing a favorite from among these. And I haven't seen enough Hitch, I know, to fairly assess the entire canon. More gems, I'm sure, await me.

As Madison Avenue exec Roger Thornhill, Cary Grant finds himself enmeshed in a world of espionage, all thanks to a case of mistaken identity. Superspy Vandamm (James Mason, whose voice I now realize Eddie Izzard has perfected in his imitative routines) confuses Thornhill for CIA operative George Kaplan, and the chase is on: Thornhill is off to find the real Kaplan with the help of femme fatale Eve Kendall (the radiant Eva Marie Saint), while Vandamm wants to stop Thornhill/Kaplan from thwarting the dastardly smuggling of secrets.

In some ways, this is, as screenwriter Ernest Lehman remarked, "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures." It's a sweeping epic across America, unlike anything Hitch had done before. The suspense is non pareil, the score by Bernard Herrmann thoroughly rousing, and the direction extraordinarily gifted. This was Cary Grant's last film with Hitchcock, and the two - as if knowing this was their final collaboration - have thrown everything into the movie.

The brilliance of the film lies in the film's ability to thrust us directly into Thornhill's shoes. Like the hapless ad exec, we have no idea who George Kaplan is, and we have even less idea what he has to do with the whole story. As Thornhill pieces together the stray tidbits of information he gets, so do we. However, very early on, we learn something that Thornhill doesn't: George Kaplan isn't real. This is the ultimate MacGuffin, Hitchcock's favorite film device - the plot element that drives the story and characters forward but is ultimately inconsequential (think the $40,000 in Psycho or the eponymous Maltese Falcon from 1941). The characters are ultimately chasing a ghost, yet it's not the ghost that holds the weight of the story. It's how firmly characters believe in the ghost that truly matters.

I tend to be a more passive filmgoer than most; that is to say, it's very seldom that a movie gets me physically riled up. Of course, emotions run high when I'm watching a movie, and I'm not embarassed to say that film has made me cry as many times as it's made me laugh. Yet by the end of North by Northwest and its (in)famous grapple atop Mount Rushmore, my heart was racing. Take that, Jack Bauer - this is the ultimate spy story.

So much literature has been exhausted in lauding Hitchcock for his masterful direction, yet I must beg permission for a few more words of praise. The direction here is perfect, never allowing the viewer to forget important plot elements such as the pistol loaded with blanks. And of course, for sheer potent sexual suggestion, nothing beats the film's closing shot of a train driving into a tunnel. It says a lot that no one's beaten this imagery, the strongest in subtle erotic imagery since the dual cigarettes in 1942's Now, Voyager.

If it's a no-holds-barred thrill ride you're after, I can't think of a better one than North by Northwest. Coming before James Bond, Jason Bourne, and all those other similarly-initialed superspies, I can't help but feel that this was a pioneer film from which a lot of espionage dramas have taken their cues. You'll be surprised at how familiar the film seems, yet you'll be dazzled by how immersive the experience is.

Just keep an eye on the MacGuffin.