IS THIS THE SEXIEST FILM EVER MADE?
No nudity, no bedroom action, just a kiss on a train… but as North By Northwest opens on the stage ROBERT GORE-LANGTON lauds Hitchcock’s timeless thriller
IF YOU call yourself a film fan, the words North By Northwest won’t remind you of a compass. It is the title of a terrific picture that has now become a stage play. Why a play? Well, it’s a good question. But I for one am going to see it, purely out of intrigue. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t work – as long as you are not expecting Cary Grant himself.
The 1959 film was directed by Alfred Hitchcock. You can see him in the film as a man missing a bus. The result is the most enjoyable light thriller to come out of Hollywood. There’s no nudity and no grunting and yet it’s perhaps the sexiest film ever made.
Was Cary Grant ever better? He plays the glib, debonair bachelor advertising executive Roger Thornhill. His secretary deals with presents for his girlfriends, he likes a cocktail called a Gibson and he handles the Skin Glow account. Before you know it, he is kidnapped from his Manhattan life and is chased by enemy agents who believe him to be a man called Kaplan they need to kill. (Something to do with a microfilm.)
Thornhill, protesting his innocence, is whisked off to a palatial pad in Long Island where the baddies force bourbon down his throat and send him off in his car along a coast road, hoping that he will crash – fatally.
He does crash... but unharmed, he ends up drunk in jail. You know you are in a good film when he doesn’t call his lawyer but his mother. Being a Cary Grant film, he is of course very fond of his frustrating mother.
The deeply confused Roger Thornhill deals with his predicament in true Cary Grant style. Creases intact. His wit as polished as his expensive shoes. However traumatic his circumstances, he doesn’t lose his cool. “Not that I mind a slight case of abduction now and then,” he quips to his kidnappers. “But I have tickets for the theatre this evening.”
James Mason as the baddie is at his most sinuous and suave. He is wonderfully supported by Martin Landau – who has just died – who made his name in the film. Irritated by his captive’s insistence that they have got the wrong man (which is genuine) Mason accuses him of over-acting.
CARY Grant retorts. “The only performance that will satisfy you is when I play dead.” Mason replies with menace: “Your very next role. You’ll be quite convincing, I assure you.”
They don’t write ’em like that any more. The script is by Ernest Lehman who wanted to write “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures”.
He did, too, although for some critics the movie is perhaps a shade too successful, too superficial. But the lack of Freudian claptrap that you get in so many Hitchcock films seems to me its great strength. That and the wonderful music, by Bernard Herrmann, who had also written the gorgeous, yearning score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo a couple of years before.
Cary Grant was a Bristolian, James Mason from Huddersfield, and Hitchcock from Essex. Yet the film is fully American. From the dazzling opening skyscraper credits we go from Manhattan to the great outdoors.
It’s one adventure after another, a bit like an American version of The 39 Steps. In one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, our man takes a bus from Chicago out into the flat crop fields of mid-America.
He stands in the middle of nowhere and asks an old timer if his name is Kaplan, the mysterious man he is meant to meet. “Can’t say it is, cos it ain’t,” says the farmer.
Thornhill then idly notices the crop-dusting plane that will soon attack him. Next thing you know Cary Grant is sprinting for his life – in a suit.
I am not the first to point out that North By Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. A suit that GQ Magazine called the best suit in film history. It was made on Savile Row, a mid-grey wool Kilgour two-piece.
Sixteen were apparently made for the star’s use in the film. Grant, a dresser of great fastidiousness, had a contract that allowed him to keep his studio wardrobe. The preposterous plot or the daftness of using an aeroplane to kill a man on the ground never enter your head when watching the scene.
Throughout the film you just live the nightmare and lap up the romance. And the romance is supplied in spades by Eva Marie Saint (now in her 90s) as Eve Kendall, the blonde he meets on a train.
Saint, with her shining platinum hair – just as Hitch liked it – has lovely comehither eyes, contradicted by a touch of frost in her demeanour.
She is the perfect foil for Grant and miles better, in my view, than two rival Hitchcock blondes, the boring Tippi Hedren and that overstuffed sofa Kim Novak.
Hitch didn’t like the way his star had been dressed so he took her shopping at the New York store Bergdorf Goodman. Models paraded outfits and the director chose them. He also oversaw her hair, make-up, shoes, jewellery, gloves – everything.
The fat and ugly “Hitch” thus created the ideal woman he so desired. Saint is her co-star’s match. Her sexual candour makes the film and gives its romance a real edge. True, she is not a goddess in the way that Grace Kelly was in Rear Window. But she is perfect for the film. They really do seem like strangers on a train. He is wanted for a murder he didn’t commit and she knows (because she is a goodie undercover spy) that he is innocent.
BESIDES, she tells him that he has “a nice face”. They fall in love over a cigarette that he lights for her. The worst day of his life has suddenly improved by a factor of 5,000.
Their compartment smooch is a joy to behold. She tells him he is a man of taste. “Mmmm… and I like your flavour,” he says, nuzzling her throat. When Cary Grant kisses a girl, she stays kissed.
Off-screen, mind you, rumours about the actor’s sexuality have never gone away. It is often claimed he was bisexual. Who really knows? Or cares. He was perfectly happy teasing the gossip columnists about the possibility. The fact is, Grant was married five times and none of his wives thought he was gay.
As an actor he was tough. He thought the script didn’t make sense and was uneasy during the shoot. But Hitchcock wanted it that way so that its star looks genuinely baffled throughout. If true, the trick worked.
The final scene, shot at Mount Rushmore where the giant faces of legendary America presidents are carved into the rock, is nail-biting. One minute he saves Eve from falling to her death, the next they’re back in the top bunk of the train. Hitchcock implies what sort of night the lovers were in for by showing the train enter a tunnel.
James Stewart was originally intended for the lead role and “Jimmy” would have been great. But Cary Grant was perfection and the film remains a piece of sheer class from beginning to end. No wonder the theatre wants to recreate the magic.