Monday, 19th June, 2006, am
299.V: A. Hitchcock: North By North West, 1959, full screen version, 130'35"
North by North West is an entertainment in which Hitchcock sets out to put an advertising executive through a series of iconic torments. This being Cary Grant, there isn't a moment when he seems in danger of getting more than a little dusty. With it's action, romance and tongue-in-cheek it isn't a long way from James Bond. The technology is mainly in the architecture, where the giant sculptural forms of airports, stations, hotels prepare us for the giant heads to come. In one of its most famous abstract shots, Grant is seen leaving the UN building from a great height. It has been said that the real theme is the reduction of the ad-man to punter status: he certainly loses his smart suit and is recreated by his intelligence contact in off-the-peg slacks and low shoes. Yet it just seems to underline our hero's stay-pressed, drip-dry, stainless quality. At some point along the way he forgets to ring his mother.
One curious unexpected link is Thornhill's arrival at a cantilevered modernist house all lit up at evening with the hope of taking away a woman who belongs to another man. Soon he will be scaling the balcony and a gun-shot will ring out. Then he will be captured by a wicked servant. In front of Eve as she sits at a coffee-table are three open receptacles, one the ash tray into which his matches will be tossed. Shades of Under Capricorn of all unexpected things.
For the love theme, Herrmann shamelessly filched great chunks of his own Vertigo score with another reminiscence of the gutter-clinging mofif at the Rushmore climax.
From the mid fifties, Hitchcock used the new medium television to promote himself as a brand. He succeeded in raising his profile with the general public but he was not afforded the respect he was to achieve later. With familiarity came some contempt. It was notably outside the reach of the syndicated television shows, among French big-screen oriented intellectuals that his reputation would be rescued. The producers of the television shows liked to come up with ideas which would push the comedic persona of Hitchcock to the limits and were often surprised at how far he would go. He understood perfectly well that he was packaging himself - sometimes literally, for example in the introduction to The Jar, in which he appeared inside a large bottle, comparing himself to the Geni.
In his sales pitch for the Hitchcock brand, he was entering a competitive arena, not just with other tv shows and personalities but even within his own programmes, where he had to share the limelight with commercial sponsors. These could vary from season to season and might be changed as the shows were syndicated. The intrusion of sponsors' announcements was turned into a part of his dark comedic persona, as he would make disparaging remarks and even on one occasion, aimed a shot-gun at the ad-men.
In North by North West, he created his own glossiest and most commercial product, featuring that most polished of self-created products Cary Grant. He starts out as the arch-manipulator, a Madison Avenue executive, secure in his belief that people enjoy being manipulated. Mistaken for a shell man in the game of espionage, he becomes successively a punter, a consumer and a product wrapped and unwrapped by others. It isn't a profound conception and the story is more a series of episodes than an incremental development of character. Along the way he encounters a house full of imposters, a diplomat whose identity is stolen as a prelude to his murder, a double agent whom he endangers, a policeman whose name he doubts, a minder who redresses him, a frumpish woman who seems to recognize he is Cary Grant as he passes through her bedroom. Somewhere along the route, he forgets to call mother. In fact she disappears from the picture as soon as he meets Eve. In the Finale, he is reduced to a tiny insignificant blot on the monetary façades of Mount Rushmore. Hitchcock wanted to put him inside the mouth of one President - Thomas Jefferson, I think - but permission was refused. We would, in other words have seen him eaten by the face on the dollar in a neat reversal of the line he uses in the opening scene about gold-wrapped chocolates being like eating money. Then the gift is meant as an apology for his own desertion.
Wednesday, 21st June, 2006 am
010.D: North by North West, making of, documentary, 2000, 39'24"
010.D: A. Hitchcock: North By North West, 1959, wide screen version, first 72' only
Another viewing of North by North West suggests that it is more than just "audience-pleaser with effective roller-coaster dynamics". While Exchange of Guilt has long been a standard way to analyse Hitchcock's films, N x NW is filled with exchanges which make it one of his more radical works. While it has been said that during the film, Cary Grant undergoes a humbling process which takes him from manipulator of public tastes into becoming a punter, I think the process is more far-reaching. Essentially the whole film is a package notable for its seeming emptiness. Yet it could at least be ackowledged as a picture about added values.
We first hear Grant dictating notes on the hoof to his long-suffering secretary. Among the notes is one to apologise to a woman with a gift of chocolate wrapped to look like money. Next he grabs a cab from a competitor by claiming his secretary is ill, his excuse being that the act will make the man feel good. In the hotel, he is substituted for George Kaplan - or Kaplin - the name seems to change from minute to minute and the name sounding distinctly Jewish reminds us of all those Garfields who began as Garfinkles. At the Townsend residence he meets a false Townsend and is subjected to a form of torture by two luxury products, booze and a Mercedes. Later a false maternal figure will meet his own mother as the events of the night are falsely reconstructed. Kaplan is a name with nothing inside. His own wallet full of ID cards may remind us of Marnie's multiple identities. Even the cop who interviews has a name he does note believe - Emile. The line, "Pay the two dollars" is an old punchline from a vaudeville sketch? At the hotel, the staff think they know him. By the time he meets Eve Kendall, he is assessed as a product himself and packaged like a sardine. He is a hidden person, a non-person, hiding in bathrooms and bunks. Eve assesses him as a better pastime than the book she has started - presumably because she judged it by its cover. Ironically, she sells the trout on the menu to him by excusing it for being, "A little trouty but quite good," as if such authenticity is a flaw. She refers to the bunk key as the can-opener and he compares his plight to that of a sardine.
In a famous scene he passes through the hotel room of a frumpish woman and she is clearly delighted to see what? Kaplan? Thornhill? No, Cary Grant surely! He is redressed in anonymous down-market clothes by his minder.
©James Beswick Whitehead, 2006