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Spies and Lovers: North by Northwest
- University of California Press
- Chapter
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156 Although Alfred Hitchcock is identified with a certain type of thriller or murder story, he actually made a wide variety of films, including two costume pictures, a prize fight melodrama, an adaptation of a Seán O’Casey play, a screwball comedy, and (believe it or not) an operetta. His reputation as the “master of suspense” evolved slowly and was determined in large part by a series of critically and commercially successful spy movies he directed at Gaumont British and Gainsborough Pictures between 1934 and 1938. In Hollywood during the early 1940s, he filmed two patriotic adventures about espionage, and over the next twenty years he periodically returned to the theme, treating it in a somewhat more ambiguous style appropriate to the cold war. Of his dozen features in this vein, however, none was more popular, influential, or commonly associated with his authorial signature than the comic-romantic epic North by Northwest (1959). Produced by Hitchcock under a special one-picture arrangement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, this film drew on the talents of the director’s most brilliant collaborators, including actor Cary Grant, cinematographer Robert Burks, composer Bernard Herrmann, production designer Robert Boyle, and graphic artist Saul Bass; it was released at the peak of Hitchcock’s celebrity on American television, and in many ways it functioned as a capstone to or summary of his career. In the course of their book-length interview, François Truffaut told Hitchcock that “Just as The [39] Steps may be regarded as the compendium of your work in Britain, North by Northwest is the picture that epitomizes the whole of your work in America” (249). Hitchcock neither supported nor denied Truffaut’s claim, perhaps because many of his most characteristic films were less about political intrigue than about sexual guilt and anxieties in private settings. But screenwriter Ernest Lehman has confirmed that North by Northwest was intended as a kind of homage or retrospective. In 1957, Lehman was hired Spies and Lovers North by Northwest Spies and Lovers / 157 by Hitchcock to develop a script from Hammond Innes’s novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare; he soon abandoned the job, feeling that neither he nor Hitchcock had any real interest in it. According to Lehman, the two men continued to converse until a better idea emerged: “One day I said, ‘I want to do a Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.’ And by that I meant a movie-movie—with glamour, wit, excitement, movement, big scenes, a large canvas, innocent bystander caught up in great derring-do, in the Hitchcock manner. And then one day he said, a little wistfully, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a chase sequence across the faces of Mount Rushmore’” (quoted in Spoto, 343). Hitchcock had been fond of staging melodramatic chases against the backdrop of imperial monuments ever since Blackmail (1929), which climaxes with the police scurrying across the roof of the British Museum.The mere idea of a cliff-hanging scene on Mount Rushmore was enough to start Lehman working on a new project, entitled In a Northwesterly Direction. (At later stages the film was called Breathless and The Man on Lincoln’s Nose; MGM’s story editor, Kenneth MacKenna, suggested the title that was eventually adopted.) Lehman’s screenplay, developed after a series of story conferences in which Hitchcock described various surrealistic episodes that might be used, was an obvious attempt to draw together themes and situations from at least three of the director’s previous films about international espionage, blending them into a spectacular and definitively “Hitchcockian” entertainment.As in The 39 Steps (1935), an ordinary man falls by accident into a bizarre adventure; falsely accused of a murder, he leads the police on a treacherous and amusing cross-country chase, in the course of which he meets a beautiful woman, exposes a group of foreign agents, and proves his innocence. As in Saboteur (1942), the protagonist finds himself locked in a climactic life-and-death struggle with a sadistic spy atop a national monument . And as in Notorious (1946), a coolly pragmatic American bureaucracy persuades an insecure woman to sleep with the enemy for “patriotic” reasons; when the woman complies, the hero and the villain become jealous rivals for her love, and neither side in the ideological struggle can lay claim to moral or ethical purity. Most criticism of the film has concentrated on such issues, although Lehman’s screenplay was equally predicated on Hitchcock’s ability to “get a...