North by Northwest is a 1959 American spy thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason. The original screenplay written by Ernest Lehman was intended to be the basis for "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures".
North by Northwest is a tale of mistaken identity: an innocent man (Grant) is pursued across the United States by agents of a mysterious organization that aims to prevent him from blocking their plan to smuggle microfilm containing government secrets out of the country. It is one of several Hitchcock films featuring a musical score by Bernard Herrmann and an opening title sequence by graphic designer Saul Bass. The film was the first to feature extended use of kinetic typography in its opening credits.
The film was released on July 1, 1959, to critical and commercial success. It topped the box office in the United States for seven consecutive weeks. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards and earned Hitchcock the Silver Shell for Best Director at the San Sebastián Film Festival.
North by Northwest is listed among the canonical Hitchcock films of the 1950s and is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. In 1995, the Library of Congress selected North by Northwest for preservation in the National Film Registry, having being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot A waiter pages George Kaplan at the Oak Room restaurant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City at the request of two well-dressed men. While summoning the same waiter, advertising executive Roger Thornhill is mistaken for Kaplan, kidnapped by the pair, and brought to the estate of Lester Townsend in Glen Cove. Townsend interrogates Thornhill and subsequently arranges to kill him in a staged drunk-driving crash; Thornhill survives, but fails to convince the police or his mother of what happened. Upon returning to the estate, Thornhill learns that Townsend is a United Nations diplomat.
Thornhill and his mother sneak into Kaplan's empty room at the Plaza, where the thugs have followed him. Thornhill heads to the United Nations General Assembly Building to meet Townsend, who turns out to be a different man. As he asks him about the man impersonating him, one of the gang's thugs throws a knife into Townsend's back. Thornhill is photographed grabbing at the knife, giving the appearance that he is the murderer. Thornhill flees, attempting to find the real Kaplan.
The "United States Intelligence Agency" (USIA) realizes that Thornhill has been mistaken for Kaplan, a non-existent agent they created as a decoy to distract their quarries, but its chief, "the Professor", decides against rescuing him for fear of compromising their operation. Thornhill sneaks aboard the luxurious 20th Century Limited train to Chicago without a ticket and meets Eve Kendall, who hides him from the police in her stateroom's upper berth. Kendall helps Thornhill elude a police dragnet. Kendall then says that she has arranged a meeting with Kaplan at a rural bus stop in Indiana. Thornhill arrives there and is attacked by a crop duster armed with a machine gun. After being flushed from cover in a cornfield, he attempts to halt a passing tanker truck; the airplane crashes into it and both explode. In the ensuing confusion, Thornhill steals a bystander's pickup truck. At Kaplan's hotel in Chicago, Thornhill learns that Kaplan had checked out before the time when Kendall claimed to have spoken with him. He goes to her room and confronts her, but she eludes him.
Thornhill tracks Kendall to an art auction, where the Townsend impersonator—Phillip Vandamm, the ringleader of the group—is purchasing a small statue. Vandamm instructs his henchmen to deal with Thornhill. Thornhill disrupts the auction until police are called to remove him. He confesses to them that he is the fugitive murderer, but the Professor intervenes. At the airport, he tells Thornhill that Kaplan was fictitious and that Kendall is their real agent. Vandamm lives above Mount Rushmore, and the agency thinks he will be leaving the country by plane from there. Thornhill agrees to help maintain Kendall's cover.
At the Mount Rushmore visitor center, now playing the role of Kaplan at the USIA's request, Thornhill negotiates for Vandamm's turnover of Kendall to be arrested. Kendall shoots Thornhill with blanks and flees. Afterward, the Professor arranges for Thornhill and Kendall to meet; Thornhill learns that Kendall is to depart on the plane with Vandamm and his right-hand man Leonard. He tries to dissuade her from going, but is knocked unconscious by the Professor's driver and locked in a hospital room.
Thornhill escapes, goes to Vandamm's home to rescue Kendall and overhears that the sculpture holds microfilm and that Leonard has discovered the blanks in Kendall's gun. Vandamm indicates that he will throw Kendall from the plane; Thornhill warns her with a surreptitious note. Vandamm, Leonard, and Kendall head for the plane. Thornhill is held at gunpoint by the housekeeper until he realizes she is holding Kendall's gun. As Vandamm boards, Kendall takes the sculpture and runs to the pursuing Thornhill, and they flee to the top of Mount Rushmore. While climbing down, they are pursued by Vandamm's men. A park ranger fatally shoots Leonard, and Vandamm is taken into custody by the Professor.
As Kendall hangs on by her fingertips, Thornhill reaches down to pull her up and there is a cut to Thornhill pulling Kendall into the upper berth of a train compartment, saying, "Come along, Mrs. Thornhill". They share a passionate embrace as the train enters a tunnel.
Cast Cast information from Turner Classic Movies Database
Hitchcock's cameo appearances are a signature occurrence in most of his films. In North by Northwest, he is seen getting a bus door slammed in his face just as his credit appears on the screen. There has been some speculation as to whether he made one of his rare second appearances, this time at around the 45-minute mark in drag as a woman in a turquoise dress on the train, but the woman was played by Jesslyn Fax, who went on to appear in many episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She had previously appeared in Rear Window.
Production Writing
Hitchcock often told journalists of an idea that he had about Cary Grant hiding from the villains inside Abraham Lincoln's nose and being given away when he sneezes. He speculated that the film could be called The Man on Lincoln's Nose. Hitchcock sat on the idea, waiting for the right screenwriter to develop it. The original traveling salesman character had been suited to James Stewart, but Lehman changed it to a Madison Avenue advertising executive, a position that he had formerly held.
John Russell Taylor's 1978 biography Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock suggests that the story originated after a spell of writer's block during the scripting of another film project:
Lehman repeated this story in the documentary Destination Hitchcock: The Making of North by Northwest that accompanied the 2001 DVD release of the film. Screenwriter William Goldman insisted in Which Lie Did I Tell? that it was Lehman who created North by Northwest and that many of Hitchcock's ideas were not used. Hitchcock had the idea of the hero being stranded in the middle of nowhere but suggested that the villains try to kill him with a tornado. "But they're trying to kill him. How are they going to work up a cyclone?" Lehman responded. "I just can't tell you who said what to whom, but somewhere during that afternoon, the cyclone in the sky became the crop-duster plane."
Hitchcock had been working on the story for nearly nine years prior to meeting Lehman. Otis Guernsey was the American journalist who had the idea which influenced Hitchcock; he was inspired by Operation Mincemeat, a British intelligence operation during World War II in which MI5 invented a fictitious officer and planted a dead body and misleading papers to be discovered by the Germans in order to mislead them about the coming Allied invasion of Sicily. Guernsey turned his idea into a story about an American salesman who travels to the Middle East and is mistaken for a fictitious agent, becoming "saddled with a romantic and dangerous identity".
Guernsey admitted that his treatment was full of "corn" and "lacking logic", and he urged Hitchcock to do what he liked with the story. Hitchcock bought the 60 pages for $10,000. In an interview in the book Screenwriters on Screenwriting (1995), Lehman stated that he had already written much of the screenplay before coming up with critical elements of the climax. An example of the "corn" in the finished screenplay was the scene where Roger Thornhill returns to the Townsend estate with the detectives to find everything changed. If Thornhill was indeed a spy, he would have had no reason to return to the estate after his escape the previous night, nor would the criminals be expecting him to return as they obviously did.
This was the only Hitchcock film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Since 1986, it has been owned by Turner Entertainment, as part of the pre-May 1986 MGM film library that it acquired through temporary ownership of MGM.
Production costs on North by Northwest rose when a delay in filming put Cary Grant into the penalty phase of his contract, resulting in his being paid an additional $5,000 per day before shooting even began.
Casting Eva Marie Saint's agent had told her that she had received an invitation to a dinner with Alfred Hitchcock and his family, the first time she and Hitchcock met. Days after the dinner, Saint's mother called her and reminded her that Hitchcock loved casting women wearing beige clothing and white gloves. Following her mother's advice, she met with Hitchcock again, wearing that combination. She credited this for helping her win the role. MGM wanted Cyd Charisse for the role of Eve Kendall. Hitchcock stood by his choice of Saint.
Hitchcock attended the play Middle of the Night in order to watch a performance by Edward G. Robinson. After being impressed by the performance of Martin Landau, Hitchcock asked to meet him at MGM. Landau arrived and Hitchcock showed him the entirety of the project, including the storyboards; while they were looking at the project, Hitchcock turned and told Landau, "You're now Leonard."
Filming
At Hitchcock's insistence, the film was made in Paramount's VistaVision widescreen process. The only other VistaVision film made at MGM was High Society.
The opening title sequence by graphic designer Saul Bass made North by Northwest the first film to feature extended use of kinetic typography in its opening credits.
The aircraft flying in the aerial chase scene is a Naval Aircraft Factory N3N Canary, better known as the "Yellow Peril", a World War II Navy primary trainer sometimes converted for crop-dusting.The Yellow Peril: N3N , Laverne Hoestenbach, "The Dispatch", Winter 1992 The aircraft that hits the truck and explodes is a wartime Boeing-Stearman Model 75 trainer, and many of these were used for agricultural purposes until the 1970s. The plane was piloted by Bob Coe, a crop-duster from Wasco, California.The Bakersfield Californian, Wasco man had Hitchcock movie role, October 11, 2007 Hitchcock placed replicas of square Indiana highway signs in the scene. In 2000, The Guardian ranked the crop-duster scene at No. 29 on their list of "The top 100 film moments". The British film magazine Empire ranked it as the "greatest movie moment" of all time in its August 2009 issue.
Among the locations used in the film are: 430 Park Avenue