‘North by Northwest’ 4K UHD (review)

Warner Bros.

North by Northwest is one of the best known and best loved films by arguably the most famous film director of all time, Alfred Hitchcock. You know it’s good. I know it’s good. Tribesmen in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea know it is good.

What’s worth talking about in this space is what makes North by Northwest, made at the height of Hitchcock’s commercial power and artistic freedom, uniquely engaging in Hitchock’s immense filmography of classics, and how it informs filmmaking now.

North by Northwest is, to my knowledge, one of the first dramatic Hollywood films with a metatextual element: screenwriter Ernest Lehman had produced a string of hits through the late 40’s and 50’s and when he was paired with Hitchcock on another project that wasn’t going well, pitched the legendary director on the idea to “to make the ultimate Hitchcock film.”

The incredible suspense sequences, recognizable to people who haven’t seen the film due to how many times they’ve been pastiched or spoofed, were constructed first and the plot was created as an exercise of getting the characters from one set piece to another.

This notion of reveling in a director’s personal celebrity and artistic tendencies and building the film around whatever they felt like shooting could have, and has been, the recipe for a hubris-filled disaster.

North by Northwest rises above and remains a classic to this day I think principally for two reasons: First, Hitchcock’s cinematic instincts were so finely tuned by this time that his ideas were not just visually intriguing but they also draw the story forward with incredible momentum: everyone remembers the chase across Mount Rushmore and star Cary Grant being menaced by a crop duster in the desert but consider the murder at the United Nations which manages to be both darkly comic and nightmarish at the same time in how quickly everyone jump to the wrong conclusion.

Secondly, this is one of the most perfectly cast films ever made during the studio system period. Hitchcock originally wanted James Stewart for the lead, but it is impossible to imagine anyone but Cary Grant as Roger O. Thornhill, whom he plays with just the right touch of irony. Grant was getting older and he plays somewhat against type here as a vain, almost sheltered man who is caught up in events far beyond his depth from the beginning. Eva Marie Saint plays Eve Kendall with a Mona Lisa smile– she seems to be too good to be true and ends up being just good enough. Legend has it that she was cast because she attended a dinner with Hitchcock and the Master liked her outfit, but it’s hard to imagine any other of Hitch’s leading ladies being able to strike the same balance of ironic detachment and sensuality that she can here to make the whole thing work

Special attention must always be paid to Hitchcock’s villains and here, I think, is really the masterstroke. James Mason plays Van Damme, as a spy in the pre-war mold. He is malevolent and ruthless but not necessarily uncivilized or unaware of the humor of his situation. His performance is well supported by Martin Landau as his henchman, Leonard. Together the two have an almost proto-SPECTRE quality about them in how much fun they seem to be having with the part and how, like many of Connery’s villains, their manner seems to “code” them as sexual deviants even if the script doesn’t allow them to be explicitly shown as such. They are perfect foils for a Cary Grant hero who can both believably seduce Eva Marie Saint and be henpecked by his aged mother.

All of this is to say that North by Northwest is a complete distillation of the Alfred Hitchcock process. Suspense and manipulation delivered with a very particular kind of British dark, dry, wit. This is clearly the product of a man who was already comfortable appearing on television weekly and making killing jokes about the sponsors as an interlude to the suspense story of the week.

Extras include audio commentary, featurettes,  and trailer.

The particulars of the film may be jarring to a contemporary audience: when I watched this at the Ritz years ago people audibly gasped when DUI was presented as a traffic offense with a mere five dollar fine, and the whole story recalls the structure and anxieties of interwar spy stories that would have been old hat when it was new. None of that matters though, because the visual audacity and keen wit shine through as clearly today as they did in 1959.

Highest Recommendation.