Count Your Blessings #4

 

McGuffin Handlers Ponder Point of It All

CYB: North by Northwest on 4K

Hitchcock shows here how harsh fate can change destiny with the flick of a hand or a taxi driving off. Imagine if R. Thornhill spoke a second sooner and the cabbie paused so business of Mother with her cronies could be straightened out, and suppose Roger had not happened to raise his hand when the bellboy called for “Kaplan,” reminders that fate often waits on moments, not hours or events, to change our future. NXNW in a way continues AH Wrong Man fascination with random chance and what it often will do to men and women.  Every watch of North by Northwest sees me say stop! to that departing driver, no! when Roger speaks up in the Oak Room. Do I want there to be no movie --- for Cary Grant to meet Sophia Loren instead and do another misjudged comedy? I’m full invested in Cary’s calamity a mere, and exact, six minutes into North by Northwest, the moment where he is kidnapped. We care because it is Cary. What if Sterling Hayden or Richard Egan were being abducted? Would stakes seem so high? We’re less confident that Grant can get out of this mess. He’s not an action hero after all, nor a noir dweller like Hayden or Egan. I’m told James Stewart wanted the Thornhill part and expected Hitchcock to cast him. That not happening was put down to Stewart’s age and Vertigo being a disappointment. I think it’s less those things than the director wanting instead a more vulnerable leading man, a character nonplussed by his peril (“What’s this supposed to mean?”). Stewart of previous hard-tack westerns would have given abductors a fight right off whereas Grant as Roger simply can’t believe such a thing could be happening to him, let alone in the Oak Room. Grant as a man who can talk his way out of anything, steal a taxi ride at will, is the more susceptible where a gun is pointed at his ribs and quasi-comic incidents suddenly become serious. Would his abductors have shot him down in a crowded bar? Hitchcock makes us believe they would and that Roger Thornhill is not a man who can prevent that happening. All this as conveyed in six minutes bodes well for 130 more to come.

She's Not What She Seemed, But is Worldly Cary Really Surprised?

“You could tease a man to death,” says Roger to Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), and we could say the same with regard North by Northwest, for doesn’t dialogue in the dining car indicate sex to come, let alone heavy kissing in Eve’s stateroom, but then comes her telling Roger he’ll sleep on the floor like splash from a still-prevailing Code pitcher. Were we to believe this or figure they mated despite what she said? --- no-means-yes as teased by Hitchcock, who lets Thornhill refer later to Eve “using sex like a flyswatter.” Well, did she, or was Roger just wanting to provoke James Mason’s Vandamm? Eve is said by Leo G. Carroll’s “Professor” to have “bedded down” with Vandamm, none of this an issue except it is an issue, who Eve spends nights with being what North by Northwest is all about. Vandamm is a charming but murderous Soviet spy. We could cast Vandamm as James Mason’s reprise of embassy valet Diello from Five Fingers, selling secrets to the Germans during World War Two. Vandamm could be Diello renamed and back in business for the Communists. I’m concerned that post-end title Vandamm might get word out from his cell for operatives to track down and liquidate Eve for switching sides, Thornhill as well for good measure. Shouldn’t the Professor have tossed Vandamm from Mount Rushmore just to play it safe? Speaking of monuments, we were there in 1962, family and me, and I remember Rushmore’s cafeteria better than the stone heads. Had not seen the picture by that point, would not until CBS prime-time premiered it on September 29, 1967. This followed a 1966 reissue to theatres with an all-new, and improved, campaign, MGM losing money for their effort despite $419K in worldwide rentals the picture earned. Here was final argument, as if needed by this time, that library content would realize more on television than in theatres, never mind how well-regarded individual features were. 

Being Proof that Baddest Men Are Often, and Pleasingly, Wittiest and Most Sophisticated of Men

North by Northwest must surely be the funniest picture released in 1959. I laugh with it much more than I ever did at Some Like It Hot. Rio Bravo is also funny. Note it and NXNW were never classified as comedies. Per se’s in that category and of that year included Pillow Talk and The Shaggy Dog, two I’d say still work as amusement, Talk to grown-ups, Dog for kids. The rest of comedy as 59-tendered seems forgot, or is it just me forgetting? North by Northwest is comedy with dangerous elements, as is Some Like It Hot. Occurs to me then that the best of that category deal in high stakes and characters with very much to lose, comedy as relief to concerns of life and death. Villainy for Hitchcock goes hand-in-hand with gamesmanship, Vandamm’s “That’s not very sporting, using real bullets” a laugh line. Was there anyone in 1959 other than Hitchcock, Hawks, and Wilder so deft at juggling genres? Cary Grant among actors always seemed better to me where applying humor to serious situations. He gives in North by Northwest what I would call an ultra-modern performance, as if he saw ahead to tastes for the sixties, seventies, right on to now. I’m told Grant chose suits to classical and timeless fit, his choices ones I’d make today, if only I could look as good as him wearing them. Greenbriar talked lately of “hep” films and players. Cary Grant for me personified hep as Roger Thornhill. I ran North by Northwest to my cousin forty years ago, him a year older than me but never having seen it. End reaction was rapturous, “That was really good!” as if that was the last thing he expected of any film so old (old? NXNW was but twenty-one at the time, Tommy and I born well before it).

They Love Their Hitch ... TV Staple AH at Location-Chose Train Station 

North by Northwest was copied by the James Bond series, Hitchcock commenting on their having to explain missions while he just got on with them (those opening six NXNW minutes). To start with explanation of what characters need to do is to sink an enterprise early. Even John Ford fell in the trap with his Horse Soldiers the same year as NXNW. Maybe he should have conferred with Hitchcock ahead of production. Did great directors ever preview each other’s scripts and offer tips? North by Northwest caused copycats to be themselves copied right through the sixties: Charade, Mirage, Blindfold, Arabesque … there are more but I can’t remember them all. North by Northwest would be the model for all rom-com thrillers to come, even to today assuming such things are still attempted. Hitchcock was a master for making issues matter that really didn’t matter at all. His plot was complex without being complicated. He doesn’t bother much with things he knows we won’t care about. How many modern makers forget that and bore/confuse us with endless detail about “encryptions” and rogue arms dealers? I watched the latest Mission: Impossible and predictably got lost within a reel in. I admire this series in ways, narrative not among them. Or maybe it’s me being too dense to follow plain thread that is story, except I don’t find them plain. Still, the Missions are now the Bonds, or at least their substitute. For all its influence, North by Northwest has quaintness endearing to me. There is rail dine on brook trout and Gibsons (I’ve tasted neither --- are they good?), phone booths aplenty, and newsstands. We could claim movies don’t use trains for thrills anymore, but Mission: Impossible 5 did, and how. Did it also look to North by Northwest for ideas? I called this column “Count Your Blessings” and come finally to basis for the name, North by Northwest lately out on 4K from Warners. It is the expected humdinger and reward for patient wait on such perfection to arrive. To review NXNW life since 1967 sees 16mm cropped from intended 1.85 (Thornhill and the farmer waiting for his bus barely in the frame), a 35mm print long gone, release after release on varied home video, 4K a happy culmination. Recommended? And how.