Alfred Hitchcock | North by Northwest / 1959

the other man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ernest Lehman (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) North by Northwest / 1959

 

While watching North by Northwest again the other night for the 50th time (I do not exaggerate, and probably I have seen this film more times than that) I tried to puzzle out why, at the highly judgmental age of 12, the year I first saw this film, I did not like it. A year earlier I had seen Vertigo at the same movie house and was completely enraptured by it. While the 1958 film had confused me, made me even question whether it was an appropriate movie for someone of my age, I had still loved every moment of it, and sat through it twice.    

     Vertigo is still my favorite Hitchcock film, but now, obviously, I find North by Northwest highly watchable and engaging. While viewing it this time, it suddenly became apparent that, in part, it was the form that had put me off as a child. At the time, I had long been reading novels, and begun my passionate commitment to the theater, reading plays by Beckett, Albee, Ionesco, and Genet. Given my literary experience — and ignoring the issue of whether or not I was able to truly comprehend these works — I could understand the psychological structure of Vertigo. Despite its strange double-helix narrative and its languorous cinematic love-affair with the city of San Francisco, I knew it was centered on the hero, Scottie. And the multiple meanderings and confusions of the plot were those of his mind. I may not have understood his obsessions — particularly his voyeurism — but I got the idea right off.

      North by Northwest, on the other hand, was neither romance nor psychologically grounded fiction. The bond between Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) and Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) involves no mysterious workings of the mind. They are immediately attracted to each other physically and proceed to do something about it — even if later, to protect herself, Eve must throw him to the wolves, so to speak. And he, in a reciprocal gesture, returns to her, even though he knows by that time that she is somehow involved in his intended death. No, this is most definitely not a “psychological thriller!”

     There is little about the mind in this film. Roger does not know why he is being mistaken for another man, and by the end of the film may not even recognize his former self. If information is withheld from the viewer it is not so that the character will gradually perceive and reveal it. We find out everything when he does; and we are simply told the information by the CIA head (or whoever Leo G. Carroll is supposed to be) as if in a report. Eve, like her namesake, is purposely and necessarily duplicitous, engaged as she is with both the serpent of the film, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) and the thorn-laden hill (the route out, so to speak) she must climb in order to escape her life of sin, the “climb” Roger must endure to move away from his former self.

       Rather, the plot is driven by the mad linear movement of its characters on the run, from New York to Chicago and prairie environs, to Rapid City and on, finally, to the home of the symbol of American values: Mount Rushmore. They are on the run, it is clear, from their past identities.

      The structure is really quite a simple one, akin to the picaresque. Indeed, as in the traditional form, we meet our hero upon his metaphorical birth, so to speak, as he exits the dark cavern of the skyscraper office where he works as an advertising executive.

      It is hard to imagine the affable and handsome Roger as either an executive or a man who composes advertisements. Less important than his writing ads, he is a walking advertisement of American virility. “Do I look heavyish,” he asks the secretary, who treats him as if she were his nanny. “Remind me to think thin.”

      Like a child, Roger is completely selfish: his first action in the movie is to take over a cab from another would-be customer. And his dedication, like all children, is to his beloved and bemused mother. This Roger, the real man before he becomes confused with someone else, might be described as a true mamma’s boy, devoted to his job. Even his previous wives found him boring as this middle initial, “O” suggests; he is apparently a zero in life and in bed. Indeed, it is his interruption of an all-male business meeting to cable his mother that leads to his being kidnapped. As in a Charles Dickens children’s fantasy such as Oliver Twist, Roger is whisked away from home and family into a world of corporate castles—which he appropriately seems to know little of—confused identities, and American mid-western landscapes where we can assume he has never before set foot.

       After he receives the magic elixir (an overdose of bourbon) he escapes into the hands of the police, who like all authority in this kind of narrative, want only to lock him up and help to make things worse.

      After one last meeting with the increasingly disbelieving mother, he has no choice but to hit the road, like all 17-year-olds who suddenly discover that they’ve surprisingly outgrown their mother’s love.

       Throughout much of the rest of the film the villains, quite ineffectively, attempt to do away with the man who they are convinced is someone other than he argues he is. Hooking him up with a seductive temptress and sending him out into a cornfield where a crop-dusting plane attempts to riddle his body with bullets and poisonous fumes, Vandamm and his associates clumsily, although quite cinematically entertaining, attempt to get rid of the man they are convinced is someone other than who he really is. As film commentator David Melville Wingrove quite brilliantly puts it: “For me it [North by Northwest] is a Surrealist fever dream of homosexual paranoia. A covertly gay man (Grant) is pursued remorselessly by two overtly gay men (Mason and Landau) who keep insisting he is somebody he insists he is not. Sound familiar? It is.” It is almost as if, in reverse of the usual process, they have outed Roger as a latent heterosexual. 

      And so does our adult boy hero, what one might almost describe as a budding homosexual, discover other worlds as adventure follows upon adventure until together the two lovers finally climb their thorny hill, in this case represented as the literal faces of the American ideals personified by the great US presidents memorialized in the stone of Mount Rushmore. Roger even “dies,” (several times) the way all picaros generally do. At least he should have died were he in a more realist work. Hanging from the ledge of his monumental values, he is quite literally stomped out by the villain’s henchman. But in such fantastic works, we all know, death is not a true option. As genre theorist Northrup Frye has mentioned in his observations on the picaresque, although the picaro may die, he retains always the possibility of resurrection.

      It is also necessary for the sinful Eve to fall to her death; and she too, having “slipped,” is left hanging in a position that seems quite impossible. We never see her actual salvation, only the simulated one, aboard the train, as the hero invites her into his bed at the very moment the film ends.

      In short, this was a film not so very different from Cary Grant’s Bringing Up Baby of 21 years before in which a gay man is lured out of the closet by the prototype of Eva Marie Saint’s Eve, Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn) with a leopard in tow instead of a serpent.

      Moreover, North by Northwest was another Hollywood telling of how queer boys might be turned into real men, how a zero might transformed in a mysterious wanted man now suddenly found desirable by women as well—something I clearly could not comprehend back in 1959 and in some respects can still not fully comprehend. And I haven't yet mentioned the far more apparent homosexual relationship between Vandamm and his loyal right-hand man, Leonard (Martin Landau) who also kills himself, symbolically, to prove his love to the villain of the piece and, by film's end, like all homos who can't "convert," meets his necessary Hollywood end with a shot through is head.

    In a strange way, one might describe Bringing Up Baby and North by Northwest, as well as a great many other Cary Grant movies as Hollywood’s version of gay conversion therapy. Dangle a beautiful crazy and dangerous woman before the confused mamma’s boy, and you’re sure to bring him to his senses, particularly if you lock him a tiny “sleeper car” and shut him up in upper bunk where he is forced to perceive just how suffocating it is to live a closeted life.

    We now might recognize this return to older and hybrid forms as part of our postmodernist sensibility. And Vertigo seems, in contrast, to be a far more “old fashioned” movie, a sort of angst-ridden portrayal of the existentialist man in the manner of writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and artists such as Alberto Giacometti.

      One also now comprehends the comic genius of North by Northwest and enjoys the movie for the pure adventure of traversing the US landscape. And in this sense, the movie is (along with Shadow of a Doubt and The Trouble with Harry) Hitchcock’s most American work. The next year the great director would return to more European forms in the Gothic horror tale told from the viewpoint of a the psychologically disturbed iconic figure of Norman Bates.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2003

Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, III, no. 1 (October 2005).