LITTLE ROCK — In the preface to the revised edition of Hitchcock, his extended, book-length interview with the director, Francois Truffaut quotes Jean Cocteau on Marcel Proust:
“His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers.”
I thought about that the other night, when we watched the 50th anniversary Blu-ray edition of North by Northwest, about how although Alfred Hitchcock has been dead close to 30 years, he’s still one of the most important artists in my life. Like a lot of Hitchcock films, I have a kind of uncanny familiarity with North by Northwest, although I haven’t seen it in years.
I remember it a little out-of-sequence, and my real-life experience has somehow become intermingled with my memory of the movie. For instance, I remember the first time I saw New York’s Plaza Hotel in person, I thought of the North by Northwest scenes that took place in its lobby. Watching the movie the other night was a little like revisiting a room I’d slept in as a child. The proportions seemed wacky; it was at once smaller and more poignant - every scene seemed fraught with meaning.
While on one level I recognized the patent silliness of North by Northwest - is there any less efficient way to kill a man than by sending him on a fool’s errand to the middle of nowhere and then trying to shoot him down from a crop-dusting plane? - I also realized the extent to which the film has defined movies for me. Movies are precisely where outlandish things happen, where an innocent man can be pursued by forces he doesn’t understand, where he can be pulled into a sleeping berth and harbored by a femme fatale named Eve (Eva Marie Saint, the poor man’s Grace Kelly). And what lake are they constantly passing north of on their way to Chicago? Are they on the Canadian side of Lake Erie?
North by Northwest is one of those great movies that cannot withstand the barest amount of scrutiny - it is the sort of movie movie that can exist only because we are willing to collaborate with its directors and stars. Fifty years on, it keeps on ticking.
It’s a movie that’s all about the alchemy of movie stars - Jimmy Stewart wanted the part of Roger Thornhill, the Madison Avenue executive (and none too secret model for Jon Hamm’s Mad Men character Don Draper) swept up in an international conspiracy, but Hitchcock adjudged him too old. Then he proceeded to give the part to Cary Grant, who was four years older than Stewart (but whose easy urbanity was a tonal contrast to Stewart’s aw shucks earnestness).
The film also gave us an oily James Mason, whose Phillip Vandamm would provide the prototype for sophisticated, icy Bond villains of the next five decades. And, as Vandamm’s right-hand thug, we have a willowy Martin Landau, in his screen debut.
Landau’s performance is an odd and interesting one, which at times veers near woodenness, but provides the film with an intriguing adult subtext. Landau chose to play his role as a closeted homosexual with a crush on his boss, Vandamm. While Mason was playing his heavy straight - in the film, he’s Eve’s lover - no modern audience can watch North by Northwest without noting the tension between Landau’s character and Eve. He really wants to get rid of her.
It’s these textures that make North by Northwest a great movie - not its plot, which is jury-rigged from old ideas and failed gags Hitchcock had lying around. It’s a glamour show, loaded with iconic scenes that make you either smile or giggle (such as the final shot of the train entering the tunnel).
While it’s always too soon to say who is immortal, by the standards of history, Hitchcock is not even very dead yet. And, at 50, North by Northwest isn’t even very old.
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MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 02/19/2010