Background
Of all of Hitchcock's tricky thrillers, NORTH BY NORTHWEST is one of the trickiest, with a new and mostly unexpected twist at every turn. Here the great suspense director went to the zenith of his imagination in creating a nonstop action film wherein the hero may meet an ugly fate from frame to frame.
Hitchcock's wild ideas
Although Ernest Lehman wrote the script, Hitchcock rewrote it verbally with the screenwriter through many months of wild mental imaginings. The director once stated (in Jay Robert Nash's The Innovators): "NORTH BY NORTHWEST didn't end on Mt. Rushmore in one version. We got up into Siberia nearly with it, Ernie Lehman and I. I remember I had a sequence where the girl is kidnapped. They get her across the straits and they're going along a road in Siberia in an open car and a helicopter from the Alaskan side is chasing the car with a rope hanging from it and they were saying to the girl 'Grab the rope!' And she's rescued from the car but the heavies try to grab her back … it was the most daring rescue you've ever seen."
This scene was never included in the film, nor were many other scenes the director wanted desperately to make. "I remember one scene I wanted. I said: 'Can't we work it in somehow? We ought to have a scene showing a vast plain of ice and two little black figures walking towards each other … enemies or something.' I don't know what would have happened when they got together … they are going along and there is a hole in the ice, and, suddenly, a hand comes out of the hole. You've got to go wild and then tone it down. Where would the hand come from? I don't know. That's what you have to work out afterwards—That's the hard work. Get the idea, which is a startling thing, then you've got to say how you came by that. You shock 'em first and explain later. That's the power of technique."
Hitchcock's humor
The title of the film stems from a line appearing in Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, when Hamlet states to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern: "I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw." Hitchcock's tongue-in-cheek idea here was that neither he nor the tragic Hamlet were mad, although some of the scenes of NORTH BY NORTHWEST are certainly bizarre, such as the terrifying seven minutes in which Roger is strafed and pursued by an unseen, maniacal cropdusting pilot.
The great director even makes lighthearted fun of his common-man victim, Roger, or rather, has Roger himself emphasize his own peril by mocking it. As he is dragged from the auction, he passes one of Phillip's sinister minions and remarks: "I'm sorry, old boy, keep trying." Later he tells Eve in a wry and ironic comment (they are hanging on a sheer stone face of Mt. Rushmore) that "My wives divorced me. They said I led too dull a life."
Hitchcock, according to one report, considered the film to be "one big joke," and was later quoted as saying that "when Roger was on Mt. Rushmore I would have liked to put him into Lincoln's nostril and let him have a sneezing fit."
The impressive Mt. Rushmore scene was actually done on a gigantic MGM set using the Schufftan Process. Hitchcock supervised every technical aspect of the film, which gives it that extremely smooth, glossy look, although he later claimed that he intended no specially designed Freudian images except one (as quoted in Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 102): "There are no symbols in NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Oh yes! One. The last shot. The train entering the tunnel after the love scene between Roger and Eve. It's a phallic symbol but don't tell anyone."
Hitchcock had been put under contract by MGM to direct THE WRECK OF THE MARY DEARE (1959). He worked a month trying to produce a script with Ernest Lehman and then got bored and gave up. (The film was later directed by Michael Anderson.)
The director kept talking about making a film in which the hero is chased across the faces on Mt. Rushmore, and he later stated: "Now it so happened that a New York journalist had given me an idea about an ordinary businessman being mistaken for a decoy spy. I took that and, with Ernie Lehman, worked up the whole thing. It took about a year to write." Hitchcock received a $4 million budget for this film and a personal salary of $250,000 with 10 percent of the gross over $8 million (the film went on to earn $6.5 million in its initial release, but added another $14 million in rereleases).
Grant, who is wonderful as the suave but utterly trapped victim, received $450,000 for his performance plus whopping weekly overtime payments. He had appeared in three other Hitchcock films (SUSPICION, 1941, NOTORIOUS, 1946, and TO CATCH A THIEF, 1955) and this would be his last film with the great director of suspense. So familiar with each other were actor and director that Hitchcock hardly directed Grant at all and often took the actor's suggestions about angles and setups.
Saint was a Hitchcock creation, another cool, aloof blonde whom he transformed from "the mousey" type seen in ON THE WATERFRONT (1954) to a sleek, sexy, and sophisticated woman, selecting every bit of Saint's wardrobe for her.
The supporting cast is superb, with Mason as the introspective but ruthless spymaster and Landau, Adam Williams, and Robert Ellenstein doing journeyman work as a trio of despicable villains. Jessie Royce Landis is a standout as Grant's capricious mother, and Carroll is convincing as the world-weary American chief of intelligence. (This was Carroll's sixth film with Hitchcock, certainly a record; the previous five included REBECCA, 1940, SUSPICION, 1941, SPELLBOUND, 1945, THE PARADINE CASE, 1948, and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, 1951.)
Bernard Herrmann's score is full of the same kind of insouciance and brightness that permeates the rest of the production credits of this stellar classic.
Awards
Nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Story and Screenplay, Best Art Direction, and Best Film Editing.
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