North by Northwest

What Claudette said:

We watched North by Northwest because a colleague recommended it and a book about mid-century modern highlighted this movie for examples of that style I had to watch it. Tristan and I also could tell that Hitchcock had a sense of humour as shown in the closing scene with the train.

Mike’s verdict:

This was a highly entertaining film to watch.  There are no lessons to learn, no philosophy to consider, no heavy issues that stay with you for days. It’s just an old-fashioned, regular guy gets caught-up in the spy world, mystery – with just the right ratio of exposition to ambiguity.  The story isn’t complicated, because it doesn’t need to be. Every honest person has imagined being suddenly wrapped-up in a spy thriller, following clues, meeting strange people and ending up as the reluctant hero. All this film does is boil the fantasy down to its components: regular guy, mysterious woman, respectable villain, generally menacing but equally incompetent henchmen, compassion-free government agency; and then strings them together with unlikely but romantically plausible encounters. It even manages to throw in quite a few funny moments to keep things lighthearted.

There are no truly surprising twists – most audiences will anticipate all of the possibilities.  But there is still a sense of unsureness: Is she a spy? Is she a villain? Is she just a convenient plot misdirection that will be thrown away after a quick tryst on a train?

There are definitely some strange scenes that I can only presume made sense in the context of the late ’50s.  I struggle to understand why Cary Grant‘s Roger Thornhill decides to call his mother from the drunk tank, or why he subsequently takes her with the police to the mysterious Townsend house.  And for that matter, Jessie Royce Landis‘ character as Thornhill’s mother seems entirely unnecessary given that she doesn’t have a role at all after the initial set up of the plot. Maybe she’s just introduced to give Roger Thornhill some credibility as a good boy?

Either way, the scenes certainly don’t detract much from the film; they just feel out of place.  But the rest of the characters fit their roles well and the locations are believable – at least if you can suspend your disbelief just enough to accept that the villain lives in a house literally on top of Mount Rushmore.

As with Vertigo, I once again found myself envious of the of the late ’50s social scene.  It just seems so civilized! And of course, Grant’s suit has been called the “greatest in the history of cinema“.  Maybe I’m just caught up in that spy-thriller fantasy, or maybe I’m just envious of any time when people were still allowed to meet for drinks.

Overall, great movie.

9/10