Alfred Hitchcock nose a good movie location
The Man In Lincoln’s
Nose.
Believe it or not, that was Alfred Hitchcock’s original preferred title for his classic thriller, North By Northwest.
You’d probably have guessed that as, along with Cary Grant being attacked by a crop-dusting plane in a cornfield, the climactic scene in which he and Eva Marie Saint hide from the baddies on Mount Rushmore is the movie’s most-famous scene.
At one point, Hitch wanted Grant’s hiding place to be given away when he sneezed, and said the picture could even be called The Man Who Sneezed In Lincoln’s Nose.
The origins of the film were simple – Hitchcock had always wanted to do a chase across Mount Rushmore, the massive sculpture of four presidents’ heads carved into the side of a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Doane Robinson, a local businessman, came up with the idea to boost tourism and thought it should feature heroes from the American West such as Buffalo Bill.
But Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who oversaw the work with his son – appropriately named Lincoln – decided it needed broader appeal and chose instead to carve 60ft representations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
Gutzon started in late 1927 with Lincoln taking over after his death in 1941. But work only continued for another six months as although the four Presidents were intended to be sculpted from head to waist, funds ran out after $1 million had been spent.
It had taken 400 workers and the liberal use of dynamite to create the faces with 450,000 tons of granite being blasted off the mountainside.
It doesn’t quite match Borglum’s vision as Jefferson was meant to appear to Washington’s right, but after work began, the rock there was found to be unstable, so it was dynamited and shifted.
The sculptor also intended to create a secret room behind Lincoln’s hairline that would serve as a doorway to a chamber holding some of America’s most-cherished documents, but that idea was abandoned after his death.
It became an instant visitor attraction and Robinson would have been delighted that it now attracts more than two million people annually.
But not everyone was happy.
The mountain was originally called The Six Grandfathers by the local Lakota Sioux from whom the United States seized it after the Great Sioux War of 1876, despite a treaty having granted the Black Hills to them in perpetuity, just eight years before.
In 1971, though, activists occupied the monument, renaming it Mount Crazy Horse, and a memorial to their legendary leader is currently being built elsewhere in the Black Hills.