Vintage Movies: “North By Northwest”

MAGNET contributing editor Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’30s through the ’70s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.

North By Northwest (1959, 136 minutes)

There’s something about an Alfred Hitchcock-directed thriller that sticks to the ribs. An irresistible page-turner, North By Northwest is the last word in a recurring thread running through some of Hitchcock’s best movies. Through no fault of his own, an innocent bystander becomes enmeshed in calamitous circumstances beyond his control. Almost.

To his consternation, Roger Thornhill, a suave Madison Avenue advertising executive played by Cary Grant, is walked at gunpoint out of an expensive Manhattan restaurant by a pair of thugs who, with no explanation, drive him to a country estate in Glen Cove, N.Y. The man behind this odd abduction, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason at his oily best) is convinced he has captured and is about to execute a government agent named George Kaplan who’s been tracking his shady dealings.

To make it look like an accident, Vandamm’s right-hand man, Leonard (a thoroughly nasty Martin Landau), pours a fifth of bourbon down Thornhill, then places him behind the wheel of a stolen Mercedes-Benz aimed directly at a cliff above Long Island Sound. Although thoroughly tanked, Thornhill manages to gain enough control of the car to avoid a watery grave and to get picked up by a traffic cop for drunk driving, thus eluding recapture by Vandamm’s boys.

Before long, Thornhill is on the lam, onboard a train bound for Chicago, with his mug splattered over the front page of every national newspaper for a murder he didn’t commit. He meets up with Eve Kendall (the delicious Eva Marie Saint, then being groomed as the next Grace Kelly) in the dining car, and they fall for each other—maybe a little too easily.

Thornhill, with help from Eve, is dropped off by bus the next day on a desolate stretch of Indiana farm land to meet up with the real George Kaplan, hopefully to unravel this mystery. A farmer waiting at the same bus stop glances up at the sky toward an airborne bi-winger and says, “That’s funny. They’re dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.” In the film’s most memorable sequence, the airplane takes dead aim at Thornhill at an elevation of about 15 feet, with machine guns blazing, before accidentally crashing in a ball of flame into an oil tanker.

Now wise to Eve, Thornhill tracks her down, nestled up to Vandamm with Leonard nearby, at an upscale art auction back in Chicago. “The three of you together, now that’s a picture only Charles Addams could draw!” smirks Thornhill, confronting the trio. “What could possibly have made you come blundering in here, surely not an overpowering interest in art?” asks Vandamm. Thornhill returns the ball squarely: “Yes, the art of survival.” It’s a valuable skill that will come in even more handy, as he will soon learn.