340. North by Northwest (1959)

Running Time: 136 minutes
Directed By: Alfred Hitchcock
Written By: Ernest Lehman
Main Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll, Martin Landau

HITCHCOCKTOBERFEST!: PART X

After watching "North by Northwest", I'm positive that Cary Grant and James Stewart should've swapped roles, letting Cary Grant play Scottie in "Vertigo" and putting Stewart into the corn field, running from a crop duster as Roger Thornhill. I think both movies would've turned out worlds better. But I digress...

Cary Grant is Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive, but try telling that to the latest crop of Hitchcock villains, who are quite positive that his name is George Kaplan, and that he's a spy. The confusion comes when Cary Grant summons a hotel attendant, who at the same time, is paging Mr. Kaplan. Thornhill is kidnapped and taken to the Townsend masion, meeting who he can only assume is Mr. Townsend. It later turns out that the man he met is not Mr. Townsend, but rather Phillip Vandamm (Mason). The crime syndicate in the one is headed up by Vandamm and his sidekick Leonard (Landau). Thornhill is liquored up in an attempt to get rid of him, but he valiantly escapes, getting himself arrested, but out of harms way. Thronhill tries to track down the real George Kaplan to no avail and when he tries to meet back up with Mr. Townsend, he realizes that he never actually met Mr. Townsend in the first place. Mr. Townsend is quickly killed and the murder is pinned on Thornhill. Now, Thornhill is evading police and villains to save his life and clear his name and he's accompanied by Eve Kendall (Saint), whom he meets on the train to Chicage, where he hopes to find Kaplan. We quickly find out that Kaplan actually doesn't exist and instead he is an imaginary agent drummed up by U.S. Intelligence to take some of the attention off of their own agent who is working right under Vandamm's nose...the agent? You guess it...Kendall.

I have a lot of problems with this Hitchcock effort too, so step on up and I'll tell you what they are...

SPOILER ALERT!

I'll start out by saying that the first forty minutes are awesome and I actually was enjoying Cary Grant a little. I loved the scene where he calls his mother from prison, as he's still feeling the effects of the glass of bourbon that was forced on him. Then, we start to get into the wild plot, where we find out that Kaplan doesn't exist, we're introduced to Eve Kendall and it goes downhill from there...for me anyway. My first major gripe is that I don't believe that an advertising executive, mama's boy could survive for two minutes doing the things that Thornhill does. He's transformed into Superman almost immediately, as he's running from crop dusters, climbing on ledges, scaling Mt. Rushmore, etc. It's just too unbelievable. It's also never made 100% clear what the villains motives are. I mean, think about it, we never really find out what they're being investigated by U.S. Intelligence for. I mean, I guess it's because of the micro-films that they're smuggling out of auctions, but then again, we never find out what the micro-films exactly are. All we know is that they're bad and that's all that we're told and that Roger Thronhill is being targeted by them, because they think he's some imaginary spy named Kaplan. It just doesn't seem to me that it's a clear story and it loses me.

Now I'll share some of what I liked. I'll start with the score and follow it with a question: Is Bernard Hermann the greatest film composer of all-time? Music in film has never had an effect on me like his does and it really makes uninteresting scenes and movies, more interesting and gripping. I'll also continue with my small amount of praise for "North by Northwest", by applauding the chemistry that existed between Grant and Eva Marie Saint, as I truly believed that these two were made for each other. As they sit in the dining car of a train, exchanging witty, flirtatious banter, you know that Grant is just being Grant and that Eva is meeting his match. As good as their chemistry was, if Saint's character had been left out, or at least not turned out to really be a government agent, complicating things, I think the movie could've kept some of it's flow and turned out to be something better than it was. Had Grant's character been left in the dark about things, as much as we were and we, together with Thronhill, had to piece together the mystery, I think it could've been a wildly fun movie. Instead it's a plot that's too confusing and a movie that's too long and ultimately a Hitchcock failure for me.

RATING: 5/10 A '5' for a Hitchcock movie is like a '1' for any other movie. I'll leave it at that. Next up is "Psycho".

MOVIES WATCHED: 171
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 830

October 26, 2010 1:07pm