She placed herself trustingly in Hitchcock’s hands, and he rewarded that trust. MGM prepared an expensive wardrobe for her; Hitchcock rejected the designs. “I acted just like a rich man keeping a woman,” he later boasted. “I supervised the choice of her wardrobe in every detail—just as Stewart did with Novak in Vertigo.” They visited Bergdorf Goodman and picked out her clothing from the latest styles for sale.* “I suggested,” Hitchcock recalled, with impressive exactitude, that she “be dressed in a basic black suit (with a simple emerald pendant) to intimate her relationship with [James] Mason; in a heavy silk black cocktail dress subtly imprinted with wine red flowers, in scenes where she deceived Cary; in a charcoal brown, full-skirted jersey and a burnt orange burlap outfit in the scenes of action.”
The intention, Hitchcock explained, “was that she be dressed brightly while the mood of the scene was subdued—and quietly while the mood was exciting.” While filming in New York, he boasted, “I’ve done a great deal for Miss Eva Marie Saint. She was always a good actress, but [in North by Northwest] she is no longer the drab, mousy little girl she was. I’ve given her vitality and sparkle. Now she’s a beautiful actress.”
But it was true enough, and her transformation served as much to fix his own mental image of her as it did to help the actress find her character. Even off-camera: one day during a lull in the filming, Saint, decked out for the auction scene in her cocktail dress, wandered off the set for a cup of coffee. Spying her standing around with a Styrofoam cup in her hand, Hitchcock was taken aback and admonished her. “Eva Marie, you don’t get your coffee,” the director told her bluntly. “We have someone get it for you. And you drink from a porcelain cup and saucer. You are wearing a $3,000 dress, and I don’t want the extras to see you quaffing from a Styrofoam cup.”
The rest of the cast was almost ideal. Wisecracking Jessie Royce Landis, who’d stolen her scenes in To Catch a Thief, was back as Grant’s scornful mother. (It was an in-joke flattering to Grant’s perpetually young persona that, in real life, Royce was very nearly the same age as the man playing her son.) Leo G. Carroll would make his sixth appearance in a Hitchcock film as the tweedy chief of the U.S. counterintelligence agency.
Yul Brynner was Hitchcock’s original choice for the heavy—Vandamm, the importer and exporter of government secrets, and the betrayed lover of Eve Kendall. When Brynner proved elusive, Hitchcock went for James Mason, whom he had seen on the London stage early in his career—Mason played the lead, for example, in a famous revival of Escape. Mason was underrated as a suave leading man, while always creepy as a villain. (He is one actor all the guests in Rope agree on: “So attractively sinister!”)
Vandamm has a young, fiercely devoted, implicitly homosexual (“Call it my woman’s intuition, if you will”) attaché, a part for a newcomer—Martin Landau. Hitchcock had seen Landau onstage with Edward G. Robinson in the Los Angeles road show production of The Middle of the Night. Like Saint, Landau had studied with the Actors Studio, but while Saint was flexible in her approach, the younger actor’s Method was more tortured—and contrary to Hitchcock’s approach. Mason watched the director have malicious fun undercutting Landau in his first scene, where Thornhill is kidnapped and brought to meet Vandamm.
Landau had persuaded himself that it was “an important scene,” according to Mason, who shared the scene with him. “He had given it much thought and, with a sense of something already achieved, said to me, ‘There is a very clear progression for me in the course of this scene and, step by step, I have planned exactly what I must do with it.’ ”
When Hitchcock arrived to take charge, the director asked his assistant, Peggy Robertson, to remind him of the order of the setups. She consulted her notes, and said he had planned to shoot the high-angles first, then the other shots. According to Mason, the scene had been deliberately cut up, “so Landau never had a chance for his clear progression.” Mason admitted he himself wasn’t particularly stimulated by his villainous role. He liked Hitchcock, enjoyed his films, but found him a director who used actors like “animated props.”
The first footage for North by Northwest was captured in front of the United Nations on August 27, 1958. UN officials had (understandably) refused Hitchcock permission to shoot an assassination on-site, so cameraman Robert Burks hid inside a carpet-cleaning truck and stole a master shot of Cary Grant leaping out of a taxi and crossing the street to the entrance. “Then we got a still photographer to get permission to take some colored stills inside,” Hitchcock later recalled, “and I walked around with him, as if I were a visitor, whispering, ‘Take that shot from there. And now, another one from the roof down.’ We used those color photographs to reconstitute the settings in our studios.”
Establishing scenes were also photographed on Madison Avenue, at Grand Central Station, and on Long Island; then the company headed to Chicago for filming at LaSalle Station and the Ambassador Hotel; and from there to Rapid City, South Dakota, for the story’s climax at a National Park Service cafeteria, a mythical Frank Lloyd Wright-type house, and airstrip atop Mount Rushmore, ending with the famous chase across the presidential faces.
What happened at the United Nations was reprised in Rapid City. Although he knew full well what was called for in the script, the location manager had to promise there would be no depiction of violence atop the “Shrine of Democracy,” or even on the slopes, in order to secure the necessary filming permissions from the National Park Service. When the cast and crew arrived, the Hollywood folk gave interviews, and Hitchcock cheerfully dissembled. “When they say we’ll do something on Lincoln’s nose, this is very bad,” he was quoted upon landing at the Rapid City airport. “We wouldn’t dream of it. In fact, it would defeat the purpose for which we are using Mount Rushmore in the film.”
One reporter then asked specifically “about the chase scene,” according to Todd David Epp, writing for South Dakota History. “Hitchcock, ever the showman, handed the journalist a napkin with the presidents’ heads drawn on it and a dotted line purporting to show the chase path. The Rapid City newspaper printed the story and a picture of the napkin. Citing ‘patent desecration,’ the Department of the Interior (the Park Service’s parent agency), summarily revoked Hitchcock’s original permit and prohibited the filming.”
Hitchcock’s schedule for Mount Rushmore filming was cut back to only two days—and then only in the park cafeteria and parking lot, and on the terraces that afforded views of the memorial. But two days—along with permission for still shots of the stone presidents, which, as ingenuously reported in the Rapid City Daily Journal, would help in creating a full-scale replica “for additional closeup scenes back in Hollywood”—was enough.
Meanwhile at MGM, production designer Robert Boyle was busy creating a glorious fake, where everything forbidden could take place: spy planes landing on Mount Rushmore, bad guys firing guns, actors climbing over the stone faces. After viewing North by Northwest a year later, Department of Interior officials felt “hoodwinked,” according to Epp. Authorities wrote incensed letters to MGM, and South Dakota senator Karl Mundt demanded the filmmakers be penalized. The park service succeeded only in having its screen acknowledgment deleted.
Fine by Hitchcock.
Where the actors were concerned, Hitchcock was the ultimate stone face. As the years passed, he addressed actors less frequently; he consistently pared down their unnecessary dialogue; and for this film—the opposite of kitchen-sink drama—what he really required from the actors was an attitude, rather than any in-depth exploration of humanity.
Eva Marie Saint already felt transformed by her handpicked wardrobe. She recalled that all Hitchcock offered her were three simple instructions: “Lower my voice; don’t use my hands; and look directly at Cary Grant in my scenes with him, look right into his eyes. From that, I conjured up in my mind the kind of lady he saw this woman as.” He must have been right: Saint’s performance—the epitome of playful chic—stands up for all time.
Cary Grant didn’t require Hit
chcock to pick out his wardrobe. Cary Grant gave grooming tips, and Hitchcock usually told him just to “dress like Cary Grant.” And like Jimmy Stewart, Grant didn’t need acting advice, either; he picked his roles to fit him like his custom-made Saville Row suits.
During the location work in New York, Grant hid out in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, the very place where Thornhill is spotted by the thugs who mistake him for a spy. One day, the actor was summoned from his suite for the quick shot where Thornhill strolls across the hotel lobby. After he came down and did his bit, a visiting journalist, interviewing Hitchcock, wondered aloud how Grant could play the scene without conferring with the director. “Oh,” Hitchcock quipped, “he’s been walking across the lobby by himself for years!”
Grant had been effortlessly walking across the screen for almost thirty years. The friction on his last film with Hitchcock had been negligible, and by now was forgotten. But the star had always maintained an edgier relationship with Hitchcock than James Stewart had. “There was something between them that wasn’t always quite right,” recalled production designer Robert Boyle. “Hitch and I had a rapport and understanding deeper than words,” Grant liked to boast. Asked by a reporter how he communicated with Hitchcock, Grant replied, only half kidding, “All I have to do is disregard everything he says. But I guess what’s in his mind, and then I do just the opposite. Works every time, and I find it very pleasant.”
Grant didn’t need acting tips, but other coddling was called for. Although his image was one of utter poise and self-assuredness, the reality, according to costar James Mason, was an actor “conscientious, clutching his script until the last moment.” And, more than usual, Grant clutched the script of North by Northwest. The dapper actor complained incessantly that he really couldn’t make head or tails of the film’s implausible plotline. He told writer Ernest Lehman that he was afraid Hitchcock didn’t have a suitably light touch for the comedy—saying this, incidentally, within earshot of Hitchcock himself, while they were on location in New York. (The director, noted John Russell Taylor in his book, was “furiously offended.”)
Grant was still complaining in mid-September, as they returned from their whirlwind travels and location work for interiors at the MGM studio. The bulk of scenes remained to be filmed—among them the Oak Room, the Long Island mansion, the police station, the UN, the Chicago hotel room, the auction, and Grant’s scenes with Saint aboard the train. Hitchcock had mapped out a comic rendition of Vertigo’s famous revolving kiss, with Thornhill and Eve kissing in medium close-up, twisting and squeezing up against the walls of a train compartment. This time the love-making was claustrophobic, however, and it was the camera that remained fixed as the stars spinned and groped. (The extra joke is that they’re responding not only to each other, but to the train rounding a bend.)
The Mount Rushmore crescendo also had to be filmed, as well as the intricate crop-duster sequence, which had been scheduled for near Bakersfield, at the south end of the San Joaquin Valley. Over the years Hitchcock had often driven by the flatlands there en route to Santa Cruz, playing variations of the scene in his mind. Now, on location to film the scene, Hitchcock found himself barely speaking to either the star or writer of North by Northwest. Grant was still kvetching; meanwhile Lehman had developed misgivings about the next Hitchcock film, called No Bail for the Judge—misgivings strong enough that he had refused to work on the project.
It was “110 in the shade,” according to Lehman, on the day Hitchcock staged the sequence where Thornhill, keeping a rendezvous at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, is attacked by a crop duster diving down at him from the sky, forcing him to take temporary refuge in a field of corn.* Hitchcock stripped down to shirtsleeves to oversee the laborious maneuvers of the stunt airplane. Between takes, there was plenty of time for Grant to sit and brood inside his air-conditioned limousine. The star beckoned Lehman inside to gripe about the (nonexistent) logic of the scene they were filming.
Hitchcock no longer even pretended logic. “I don’t even know who was in that airplane attacking Cary Grant,” he said later. “I don’t care. So long as that audience goes through that emotion.”
“Grant and Lehman found themselves quarreling with one another,” according to John Russell Taylor, “with Grant claiming it was really a David Niven script and it was lousy anyway because he didn’t understand what was going on and he doubted if anyone else would. They were both aware, of course, that they were taking out their worries on each other because they could not manage to quarrel directly with Hitch.”
The director set these distractions aside while he stoically collected his shots in blistering heat: The stationary high-angle of the bus arriving to deposit Thornhill at an isolated stop; the ground-level view of Thornhill looking around in vain for his mysterious contact; an automobile arriving to disgorge a stranger (Malcolm Atterbury); the hilarious two-shot of the stranger and Thornhill staring suspiciously at each other from opposite sides of the highway; the stranger remarking, before he climbs on a bus headed in the opposite direction, on the peculiarity of a crop duster glimpsed in the distance, buzzing low over land where there are no crops; the crop duster wheeling and circling around, heading slowly toward Thornhill, and then diving at him and ultimately chasing him off the highway, into the rows of corn; the crop duster banking low and coming in for another attack, spraying chemical fertilizer that spreads through the rows of cornstalks, driving Thornhill back out of hiding … and then onto the highway.
The result was the justly celebrated sequence that includes the shot—one of the most recognizable in all of film—of Cary Grant racing frantically down the highway in all his sharp-suited splendor (toward the camera), with the murderous plane swooping down on him from behind.
The sequence ends with Thornhill standing in the middle of the road, defying an oil tanker that is roaring toward him, flattening himself beneath the truck just as it brakes; then sliding out from under, just as the crop duster misjudges and crashes into the tanker, exploding in a fireball. This—along with the shower scene in Psycho, the most famous of all Hitchcock crescendos—the director achieved under enormous duress and arduous weather, orchestrating elaborate stunts and effects, and finessing a star and writer who were snapping at each other just to keep from picking a fight with him.
Grant’s persona is central to the scene, but the net effect is all Hitchcock’s doing: a master blend of location plates and mattes, real scenery and fake, actors and doubles. On location the plane dove for Hitchcock, and the star of North by Northwest jogged for the director—but never in the same shot. And when Grant flopped to the ground, he flopped inside the studio—his full extension in the shot part of its beauty—in front of a prephotographed back projection.
All of it was then spliced together into a textbook montage that will be studied and enjoyed as long as cinema exists. The crop-duster sequence is a perfect Hitchcock short story—with almost no dialogue, only natural noise, and none of Bernard Herrmann’s music. One of Hitchcock’s grandest illusions, it couldn’t have been realized without the farsighted preparation and hard, hard work that characterized the whole saga of North by Northwest.
Approaching sixty, Hitchcock had already experienced intimations of mortality. In the past he had shrugged off disappointing films, but making them was now more than ever a struggle, and now each one felt important. In November, principal photography wrapped and the editing began. Bernard Herrmann started on his wittiest, most underrated score. Sam Taylor arrived, replacing Ernest Lehman on No Bail for the Judge, slated as a Paramount film to be directed by Hitchcock. (To Catch a Thief was the only other such arrangement to date.)
Meanwhile the budget of North by Northwest had risen steadily, from its original estimate of $3 million to somewhere in the lofty neighborhood of $4.3 million. By contract Cary Grant had to be paid $5,000 extra per day beyond the contracted period, as retakes and second-unit work continued. Studio chief Sol Siegel kept up a barrage of memos urging the director to stop spe
nding money, but Hitchcock ignored them. As late as April, he was still shooting additional retakes and ordering more second-unit work.
Budgetary pressures may have opened the door for Saul Bass to create another one of his signature title sequences. All along Hitchcock had envisioned a different prologue: a series of office vignettes, establishing Thornhill in his ad-agency milieu. Although Grant uncharacteristically offered to act in such a title sequence for free, it was finally faster and cheaper to job out the animation of the titles to Bass, who surpassed himself with his arrows “forming a tilted graph,” which “become a skyscraper with traffic reflected in its all-glass surface,” in the words of Bill Krohn.
Hitchcock had joined another cat-and-mouse battle with the censors, managing once again to stay ahead of the cat. He fought a “running battle” with Production Code officials throughout January and February, according to Krohn, meeting repeatedly with the censors, patiently noting their qualms and reassuring them. The censors were particularly alarmed by Leonard’s effeminacy and the mention of Thornhill’s several divorces, and of course by the train-compartment overnights, which implied sexual relations between Thornhill and Eve.
One line that bothered Code officials at every stage of the script occurred during their dining-room encounter, when Eve suggestively informs Thornhill, “I never make love on an empty stomach.” Yet that’s how the director shot it. Ultimately Hitchcock agreed to overdub the line, though his solution let him have it both ways. Eve now said, “I never discuss love on an empty stomach,” but lip-readers everywhere could decipher Hitchcock’s version.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 82