When Madison Avenue advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) goes for Martinis with his friends after work he ends up getting a bit more excitement than he'd hoped for. Thornhill is kidnapped by a couple of thugs, put in a back of a car, and driven to the estate of UN diplomat Lester Townsend (Philip Ober) where he's interrogated by Phillip Vandamm (James Mason almost purrs his lines) who is, for some reason, pretending to be Townsend.
When Vandamm's creepy stooge Leonard (a menacing looking Martin Landau makes good use of his piercing blue eyes, as they dart around they light up the screen) forces a bottle of Bourbon on Thornhill and then tries to bump him off, a now drunken Thornhill fails to convince his cynical mother, Clara (Jessie Royce Landis), or, perhaps, more importantly, the police of what has happened.
Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film North By Northwest (shown recently on BBC2, I caught up on the iPlayer) tells the story of what happens to Thornhill as he tries to prove he's not the man he's been mistaken for, the elusive George Kaplan.
When one of Vandamm's goons kills Townsend, Thornhill, who has met with him to try to clear his name, becomes the chief suspect and soon he has both the police and Vandamm's mysterious organisation (which appears to be based in Washington DC (a view of the Capitol Building from a window confirms this) and has, at its head, a suspicious figure known only as The Professor (Leo G. Carroll)) after him.
He goes on the run and on the search for Kaplan. On a train to Chicago he meets with Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). Eve's a thoroughly modern woman, surprisingly so for the era. She's none too shabby either so when she comes on to Thornhill and offers to hide him from the police, it's everything he could have asked for.
But what's in it for Eve? Why is she so desperate to shack up with America's most notorious fugitive? Thornhill's grand tour takes him from New York (we're treated to sights like the UN Secretariat Building, the Queensboro Bridge, and Grand Central Station) to Chicago (where NYC's yellow cabs are swapped for green ones), on to the plains of the midwest (for the infamous cropduster scene) and, eventually, to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota for the final denouement.
The film looks fantastic. Both Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are, of course, impeccably dressed and coiffeured throughout, the Art Deco cocktail bars and trains with fancy dining cars, the finned automobiles, even the less dynamic station wagons, and the oak dominated hotel foyers paint an enviable picture of 1950s New York and some of the buildings later on in the film, when we've headed out west, look as if they could have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
One scene even reminded me of Tracy Island from Thunderbirds. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that Gerry and Sylvia Andeson would have been Hitchcock fans. Even the stylised titles (c/o Saul Bass, naturally) look amazing and the Bernard Hermann score is a delight. There are some great lines too. Eve tells Thornhill "I had nothing to do that weekend so I decided to fall in love" and when she asks of him why he took so long shaving, Thornhill replies "big face, small razor".
It's one of the occasions where Grant can't resist a bit of screwball. I'm not sure that, or a bizarre laughing scene in an elevator, fit brilliantly with the overall mood of the film but that is more than made up for all the things that do fit together. A fantastic vertigo inducing scene shot from the top of a skyscraper sets us up for a journey fuelled not just by Cold War paranoia but also by plain old fashioned everyday paranoia.
Thornhill's not the easiest character to care about. He seems more upset when Eve tries to dump him than when he's kidnapped or someone tries to kill him. But that doesn't really matter. What the film lacks in emotional depth it more than compensates for in surface detail. It really is quite a journey. Such an extraordinary one that even the stone face of Teddy Roosevelt looks bemused by it.
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