I Watch Films: North by Northwest

 

North By Northwest

A waiter is paging George Kaplan in the bar of a New York hotel; advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) interrupts him to try and send a telegram. Thinking Thornhill is Kaplan, some men kidnap him and take him to a house outside the city where their boss (James Mason) tries to interrogate him. Getting nothing from him, as he has nothing to tell, they force drink down Thornhill, then attempt to stage an accident. Thornhill gets away, crashes a car and is arrested.

He tells his story in court, taking the detectives (and his mother) to the house, where a woman claims he got drunk and drove away. No one believes him. However he does learn the house belongs to a Mr Townsend, who works at the United Nations. Thornhill goes there, meets Townsend, who was not the man he met, then Townsend is murdered and Thornhill identified as the killer.

A partial explanation appears at this point, in the form of The Professor (Leo G Carroll) at a meeting at a US Intelligence Agency; I will extend it to the full explanation revealed later in the film. James Mason plays a man named Vandamm, who is smuggling government secrets out of the country to another one*. He’s killed two previous agents The Professor got into his organisation; to protect the latest one he's invented George Kaplan, who is booked into hotels and makes calls on Vandamm’s itinerary.

Thornhill follows Kaplan’s schedule, catches the train to Chicago, where he falls in with Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). She offers to help, hiding him from the police, because she’s working with Vandamm. She claims to have called Kaplan, sending Thornhill out to a bus stop in the middle of nowhere to meet him, where a crop dusting airplane tries to kill him in one of the iconic scenes of the film.

The film makes it’s twists and turns to the end, revealing the mystery (really just one) as Thornhill finds himself enmeshed in this web of espionage. Grant is excellent at being baffled, good at the quippy bits. “I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself "slightly" killed.” Mason excels at being slyly villainous.

Watch This: Masterful thriller combining action, confusion, amazing scenes and fun banter
Don’t Watch This: The best scenes have been parodied and pastiched to death, the rest just period nonsense

* The first stage of his journey is to fly over the border to Canada, though that’s only the beginning, so the only thing we can say for sure is that he’s not spying for Canada**.

** I mean we’re supposed to assume the Soviet Union.