Imagine: you’re a handsome and relatively successful ad man in idyllic 50s New York. You’re having a delicious mid-afternoon snack in the lobby of the Plaza hotel, which presumably cost all of $2.50, when suddenly you are abducted in broad daylight at gunpoint by two polite and well-dressed men. You don’t put up a fight. You merely walk with them to their car, trying to object in the only way you know how: asking nicely for them to stop. The kidnappers are gleeful; they’ve finally captured you, George Kaplan. That’s not your name, you exclaim, you’re Roger Thornhill! They must have the wrong man!
Thus begins Hitchcock’s funniest, most ridiculous and visually ambitious film, North by Northwest. All the hallmarks of a Hitchcock classic are here: Cary Grant as the leading man, a completely inexplicable MacGuffin (who is George Kaplan anyway? And more importantly, does anyone even care?), a director cameo, a mysterious and beautiful blonde (the darling and charming Eva Marie Saint), and a 20-minute opening so overstuffed with dialogue that you kind of tune out but it’s fine because once the inciting incident happens, you can’t look away. It’s so Hitchcockian that it borders on parody.
Released in 1959 and coming in hot after Hitchcock’s most famous Technicolor nailbiters (including Rear Window and Vertigo, heard of them?), North by Northwest is clearly the work of a film-maker who already knows his success is preordained. He can go absurd, so why not? There is absolutely no reason Cary Grant, painted in three coats of fake tan as always, should be free climbing Mount Rushmore, dodging bullets from Lincoln’s giant rocky nose after being chased around the US by an underground anti-government movement.
Grant as Thornhill is one of the most underrated comedic performances of the 20th century. Every single character he meets in this film is very clearly working to screw him over, yet he remains surprised at every turn. He is like a bronzed Homer Simpson in a well-tailored suit, blindly walking into every trap and then believing he can merely talk his way out of it. You want to shake him by the shoulders and scream: CARY, WAKE UP!
Despite being made in the thick of Hollywood’s conservative Hays Code, North by Northwest is hornier than any modern blockbuster. Grant and Saint can barely keep their hands off each other in their shared train carriage, and the film ends with an infamous shot of a steam train racing full steam ahead into a snug and innuendo-heavy tunnel. It’s hard to imagine anything as erotic in a Marvel film.
In one of the film’s most storied scenes, Grant flees from an aeroplane in an epic chase through a cornfield. Out of context, it seems random and illogical. In context, it still makes no sense. Why wouldn’t the villains just shoot him? Why concoct a plan to try to mow him down with a plane in the middle of nowhere? And that is the core thesis of the film. There is no reason other than it looks fabulous on screen, and that’s why Hitchcock is the master. As long as it looks gorgeous and the stakes are high, reason can be shoehorned into anything. Just as Grant dusts himself off after each life-or-death struggle and immediately emerges ready to trust again, it’s impossible not to enter every absurd scene in North by Northwest with blind wonder and intrigue. Over and over and over again.
North by Northwest is streaming on HBO Max in Australia and available to rent in the UK and the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
