North by Northwest (MGM, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 25) my husband Charles and I watched an Alfred Hitchcock double feature on Turner Classic Movies. First we turned on the 1959 classic North by Northwest as the final film in their all-day tribute to its female star, Eva Marie Saint, who’d died October 6 at age 102. Then the “Silent Sunday Nights” feature was 1926’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, first and best of the five films based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’s (Hiliare Belloc’s sister) 1913 novel inspired by a chance remark made by a guest at one of the Lowndes’s parties: “I think I might have had Jack the Ripper as a lodger in my boarding house.” I’ve already written extensively about The Lodger recently enough (October 17, 2022) at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lodger-story-of-london-fog.html that I don’t feel I need to repeat myself other than to note at least two oddball titles, both said by other characters describing the mystery lodger (Ivor Novello). One ran something like, “It’s good he doesn’t go for the ladies,” and another said, “He’s queer, but he’s a real gentleman.” I wondered if the title writers (Elliot Stannard got screenplay credit but often in the silent era the title cards were often written by someone other than the overall screenwriter) were playing the same game I’ve long suspected some of Rock Hudson’s writers were doing at Universal in the 1950’s: sneaking veiled but unmistakable references to their star’s real-life status as a Gay man into their dialogue. As for North by Northwest, it had one of the most unusual geneses of any Hitchcock project. MGM had borrowed Hitchcock from Paramount, his usual studio at the time, to make a film called The Wreck of the Mary Deare, based on a 1956 novel by Hammond Innes about a derelict vessel found in the English Channel. MGM assigned writer Ernest Lehman to work with Hitchcock on adapting this novel, but after three weeks neither Hitchcock nor Lehman were satisfied with the results. Lehman went up to Hitchcock and told him that, despite his long-held desire to work with him, he was quitting the film because he really couldn’t relate to the story they were supposed to be making. “Don’t be silly,” Hitchcock said. “We get along so well together, we’ll simply do something else.”

The two began brainstorming ideas for typical Hitchcock action sequences, and Hitchcock said rather ruefully, “I’ve always wanted to do a chase scene across the faces of Mount Rushmore.” Eventually Hitchcock and Lehman came up with a list of sequences, but they still didn’t have a way to connect them to a story that made sense. Then Hitchcock remembered that at one point journalist Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. had suggested to him that he make a film about a nonexistent secret agent made up by the CIA or some other country’s spy agency to cover up for a really existing agent, and he and Lehman got the idea that the central character of their film could be mistaken for this dummy agent and be pursued by the real bad guys the dummy had ostensibly been after. But who should the central character be? At first Hitchcock and Lehman thought of making him an entertainer and casting either Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin in the role, but they decided that those personalities would be too well known to be mistaken for someone else. Later Hitchcock told the plot of North by Northwest to James Stewart, star of his immediately previous film, Vertigo, and Stewart immediately fell in love with the story and wanted to play the lead. But by then Hitchcock and Lehman had already decided that the right man for the part was Cary Grant, though they waited to start the film until Stewart was already tied up with Otto Preminger’s film Anatomy of a Murder and would therefore be unable to do anything else. (MGM actually asked Hitchcock to use Gregory Peck, whom Hitchcock had already worked with before on Spellbound and The Paradine Case, but Hitchcock thought he was too stiff for the role.) Eva Marie Saint got into the film similarly; after Grant asked Sophia Loren to play it and Loren turned it down, other names mentioned included Elizabeth Taylor and Hitchcock’s own choice, Vertigo star Kim Novak. Hitchcock was reportedly nervous about using Saint because she’d been a graduate of Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, which taught the “Method” style of acting. Hitchcock had had bad experiences the last time he’d worked with a Method actor, Montgomery Clift on I Confess. They had fought throughout the shoot because Clift kept resisting Hitchcock’s directions and asking things like the archetypal Method actor’s question, “What’s my motivation?” But Hitchcock and Saint got along quite well; all he asked from her was that she drop the register of her voice a bit, and she agreed. When both Hitchcock and Saint saw the costumes Edith Head had designed for her character, neither liked them, so Hitchcock flew her to New York City and bought a whole new wardrobe for her at Bergdorf Goodman’s. It’s been reported that Hitchcock meticulously picked out her purchases for her the way James Stewart did with Kim Novak in the plot of Vertigo, but according to Saint herself, he didn’t. Instead he let her buy anything he wanted, and Saint called Hitchcock “my sugar daddy – and I mean that in a good way.”

North by Northwest opens in New York’s Plaza Hotel (before the Beatles stayed there and well before Donald Trump’s miserable stint as its owner), where advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for nonexistent spy “George Kaplan.” (Thornhill explains that he doesn’t have a middle name – the “O” doesn’t stand for anything – an in-joke reference to Hitchcock’s former employer, David Selznick, who also gave himself “O” as a middle initial even though he didn’t have a given middle name.) He’s kidnapped by two well-dressed gunmen and taken to the home of Lester Townsend in Glen Cove in upstate New York. The piece’s villain, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), poses as Townsend and interrogates Thornhill, who doesn’t know anything about “Kaplan” or any of the things Vandamm is asking him about. One of the thugs force-feeds Thornhill with liquor and sends him out in a neighbor’s Cadillac convertible, with the idea that he’ll be unable to steer the car and will eventually get killed in a drunk-driving crash. Instead he survives but is arrested by the Glen Cove police for drunk driving. Thornhill’s mother Clara (Jessie Royce Landis, who had previously played Grace Kelly’s mother in an earlier Hitchcock/Grant film, To Catch a Thief) sends defense attorney Victor Larrabee (Edward Platt, who a few years later would be the head of the spy agency CONTROL on the spoof TV series Get Smart!, and whose assistant would be called “Larrabee” in an in-joke reference to his role in this film) to bail him out. Thornhill and his mom sneak into “Kaplan”’s empty room at the Plaza, followed by the thugs. Having learned along the way that Townsend is a United Nations official who’s scheduled to address the General Assembly that afternoon, the Thornhills head for the U.N. building and page the real Townsend – who turns out to be a totally different person from the one who ordered Thornhill’s abduction. What’s more, the real Townsend immediately gets killed by a knife thrown by one of Vandamm’s thugs – and Thornhill pulls the knife out of Townsend’s back. He’s immediately suspected of Townsend’s murder and is photographed with the knife in his hand. Now he’s a fugitive from justice, in the same predicament as previous Hitchcock heroes like Robert Donat in The 39 Steps and Robert Cummings in Saboteur. Thornhill tries to buy a ticket for the 20th Century Limited to Chicago, the next stop on “Kaplan”’s itinerary, but when the clerk at the counter recognizes him from the newspaper photographs of Townsend’s alleged killer and calls the police, Thornhill sneaks aboard the train without a ticket.

There he meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who hides him out first in the train car’s restroom (having traveled on trains and used their bathrooms a lot, I related to these scenes more than I have before!) and then in Chicago after the police try to arrest him. She receives a phone call, allegedly from “Kaplan,” setting up a meeting between them at a deserted bus stop in the middle of Indiana. (Hitchcock and Lehman worked out this famous scene because, as Hitchcock said, “People in movies are always being ambushed after dark on deserted city streets. Let’s do one in totally the opposite way: alone in broad daylight.”) A nervous Thornhill first awaits “Kaplan,” then realizes that it's a trap and he’s been put into danger. But from where? He gets the clue he needs from a passer-by who’s waiting for the next bus at the stop where Thornhill came off and points out, “There’s a plane over there dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.” The crop duster turns out to be a paid assassin, part of Vandamm’s gang, and Thornhill is saved only when the pilot of the crop dusting plane loses control and crashes into an oil truck. Thornhill, sure that Eve has betrayed him to Vandamm, traces her to an art auction, where Vandamm and his men corner him. Vandamm and his gang are there to buy an Asian statuette that’s full of microfilm containing secrets they’ve stolen and are selling to unspecified foreign powers. (This is one Hitchcock film in which what he called the “MacGuffin” – the all-important object the villains are after but the audience couldn’t care less about – is even more pretextural and less relevant than usual.) Realizing that he has no other way to get out of the auction room alive, Thornhill stars disrupting it by bidding in crazy ways so he’ll be arrested by real, legitimate police rather than assassinated by Vandamm’s thugs. The cops turn him over to “The Professor” (Leo G. Carroll), head of the spy agency that created “George Kaplan” in the first place (which we’ve already learned about in a surprisingly boring expository scene both Hitchcock and Lehman should have been ashamed of). He also recruited Eve Kendall as their real agent to bring down Vandamm, who as a playgirl she previously fell for because of his surface charm and only later realized how evil he really was. “The Professor” gives Eve a blank-loaded gun and has her shoot Thornhill in a mock assassination attempt at the visitors’ center for Mount Rushmore, where Vandamm lives in a spectacular house copied from Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous designs (though actually a model built by the MGM sets and props departments). This is supposed to convince Vandamm that Eve is still on his side, but it doesn’t work because Vandamm’s right-hand man Leonard (Martin Landau) is convinced that she’s betrayed them to the U.S. government.

Interestingly, it was Martin Landau’s idea to portray Leonard as a Gay man in love with Vandamm and personally jealous of Eve. James Mason didn’t like the idea of being pushed into playing Vandamm as a Bisexual with Eve as his girlfriend and Leonard as his boyfriend, but he was stuck with it because Hitchcock and Lehman both supported it. Indeed, Lehman actually gave Landau an extra line in which he tells Vandamm that he's sure Eve has betrayed them because it’s “my woman’s intuition,” and later Vandamm, refusing to believe Leonard’s warnings that Eve has gone over to the other side, says, “You’re jealous!” (Landau later told interviewers that he wanted to play Leonard as Gay because he’d just come off playing a really butch heterosexual on stage in Paddy Chayevsky’s play Middle of the Night, and for his first film he wanted to do something totally different. “Everyone told me not to do that because it was my first big movie and people would think I was Gay,” Landau recalled. “I’m an actor. I said it wasn’t going to be my last movie, and it certainly wasn’t. I’ve never played a character like that since.”) The famous climax takes place across the faces of Mount Rushmore, and Hitchcock repeated a setup he’d done 22 years earlier in the film Young and Innocent with Derrick De Marney and Nova Pilbeam: Eve is dangling from a precipice on the mountaintop and Thornhill has to summon his last bit of strength to pull her to safety. Then Hitchcock cuts suddenly to a scene of Thornhill pulling Eve, now his (third) wife, into the upper berth of a Pullman car on a train, which in a stunningly phallic shot goes into a tunnel: the sort of thing directors working under the Production Code limitations had to work out to indicate sexuality without being able to depict it directly. My husband Charles joked it was the most dramatic jump-cut in a movie until the one between the ape throwing the bone and the spacecraft in the sky in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hitchcock also had run-ins with the officials at the National Park Service who ran Mount Rushmore. They were especially down on him for wanting to do a scene in which Thornhill would have a sneezing fit while hiding in President Lincoln’s nose. For a while Hitchcock had even wanted to call the film The Man in Lincoln’s Nose, but the Park Service officials vetoed it. Hitchcock responded by ordering MGM to remove the credit thanking the National Park Service for their cooperation during the filming, though some prints contain it. The working title was In a Northwesterly Direction, after Hitchcock and Lehman both realized that that was indeed the direction in which they’d had Thornhill and Eve travel, but they realized that sounded clunky and ultimately they settled on North by Northwest, though both director and writer insisted they did not mean it as a reference to the line in Act II, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Also Hitchcock had a run-in with MGM executives when he turned in a release cut that ran 136 minutes. MGM’s “suits” wanted it cut to under two hours, but Hitchcock re-read his contract and noted that, even without him specifically asking for it, they had won him final cut, so he was able to tell the folks at MGM to screw themselves and the film went out with only a few seconds removed from Hitchcock’s cut. It was a major box-office success and helped make up for the failure of Hitchcock’s two immediately previous films, The Wrong Man and Vertigo. North by Northwest is also remarkable for Bernard Herrmann’s music, which is so strong that one DVD edition of the film gave you the option of watching it with only Herrmann’s score on the soundtrack: no dialogue or effects noises. I was also amused to note this time around that three actors in the supporting cast went on to play leads in TV series dealing with the same plot issues of espionage and intrigue as this movie: Leo G. Carroll went on to play the head of the United Nations Committee on Law Enforcement (U.N.C.L.E.) on both The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. Martin Landau went on to play a lead in Mission: Impossible, and Edward Platt became the chief of CONTROL in the James Bond spoof Get Smart! North by Northwest is one of Hitchcock’s greatest “chase” movies, and while frankly I like Hitchcock better in what I call his “suspense of character” mode – in stories like Rebecca, Suspicion, Spellbound, Notorious, Rear Window, and Vertigo in which he’s using suspense technique to reveal the characters to us and not just excite us with thrilling chase sequences – it’s great fun and, in the slow development of the relationship between Cary Grant’s and Eva Marie Saint’s characters, more than that. There’s a revealing quote from Hitchcock offered by Lehman, who said that while they were working on it the director told him, “Ernie, do you realize what we’re doing in this picture? The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment, we play this note on them and get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react that way, and someday we won’t even have to make a movie, there'll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we'll just press different buttons and they'll go ‘ooooh’ and ‘aaaah’ and we’ll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won’t that be wonderful?” That explains why later, when Hitchcock visited the psychiatry labs at UCLA to check whether the script of his next film, Psycho, was scientifically accurate, he saw a lab in which the researchers had attached electrodes to lab monkeys and were using them to stimulate immediate emotional responses in them. “Oh, great!” Hitchcock said, “Once you learn to do that with people, I won’t have to make movies anymore!”