Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and the art… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Alfred Hitchcock’s North by North­west and the art of the chase

15 Oct 2017

Words by Adam Scovell

Man in suit watches biplane in the air against a desert backdrop.
Man in suit watches biplane in the air against a desert backdrop.
How the director’s mas­tery of space and loca­tion cre­at­ed the famous crop-duster sequence.

By any esti­ma­tion, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by North­west is absurd. Its nar­ra­tive is one of extreme coin­ci­dence and bad luck; its lead, Cary Grant, is just as con­fused about what is going on as the help­less char­ac­ter that he plays; and the film is stock full with visu­al innu­en­dos, end­ing with per­haps the most ridicu­lous of a train, phal­lic-like, enter­ing a tun­nel. North by North­west is essen­tial­ly anoth­er vari­a­tion on Hitchcock’s typ­i­cal wrong man’ nar­ra­tive but, with the addi­tion of a lav­ish dose of com­e­dy, it can be read as a fore­run­ner to the James Bond films and oth­ers of that ilk.

Adver­tis­ing direc­tor Roger Thorn­hill (Grant) rais­es his hand at the wrong moment in a bar under sur­veil­lance by the hench­men of an infor­ma­tion smug­gler, Philip Van­damm (James Mason), mis­tak­ing Thorn­hill for an FBI agent called Kaplan who him­self is mere­ly a nonex­is­tent decoy. Fur­ther being false­ly accused of the assas­si­na­tion of a UN del­e­gate, Thorn­hill is forced to flee via trains and bus­es across coun­try in search of answers. He meets Eve (Eva Marie Saint), a seem­ing guardian angel who turns out to be a dou­ble agent, pre­tend­ing to work for Van­damm but real­ly help­ing the FBI dis­cov­er his method of trans­port­ing secrets passed the Iron Cur­tain. The film is a chase to nowhere, a hunt for nobody that ensnares the wrong man again and again until he even­tu­al­ly ful­fils the role of spy.

Hitch­cock knows that to get away with the jovi­al­i­ty of the film, he needs the dan­ger at the heart of the chase to be gen­uine­ly men­ac­ing, not sim­ply anoth­er joke but some­thing qui­et and dead­ly seri­ous. He achieves the cul­mi­na­tion of this men­ace in one of the most analysed and dis­cussed scenes in his fil­mog­ra­phy: the famous crop-duster sequence. The scene is some way into the film and is real­ly the cen­tre­piece in terms of attempts on Thornhill’s life. Still play­ing the part of Vandamm’s aid, Eve sends Thorn­hill on a bus to a desert­ed high­way, sup­pos­ed­ly to meet the elu­sive Kaplan. The scene marks a shift in tone; in fact it could be from anoth­er film entirely.

It’s an exer­cise in ten­sion as Thorn­hill is increas­ing­ly con­spic­u­ous on the emp­ty road; a sharp-suit­ed Grant stick­ing out like a sore thumb in the dusty rur­al land­scape. The scene is essen­tial in that, at least until this point, the dan­ger has been treat­ed as qui­et­ly com­i­cal even when its con­se­quences have been seri­ous. Grant is still screw­balling as the knife flies into the back of the UN del­e­gate and when he’s dri­ving, forced-drunk, in order to avoid a cliff’s edge. An ear­li­er scene of a lift full of peo­ple laugh­ing at Thornhill’s moth­er ask­ing if his would-be assas­sins want to kill her son sum­maris­es the film’s atmos­phere in a micro­cosm. Yet some­thing changes in the crop-duster scene.

The first thing to note is the removal of music. Bernard Herrmann’s score, with its cas­cad­ing arpeg­gios, has dri­ven the film with a con­stant momen­tum. As soon as Thorn­hill is off the bus, stood in the mid­dle of nowhere, the music stops. The audi­ence is alone with him in the vast space and Hitch­cock goes to great lengths to point out that the land­scape effec­tive­ly box­es the char­ac­ter in with four shots; an invis­i­ble wall. The hori­zon line is not lib­er­ty for Thorn­hill but a sub­tle cage, ready for a game of cat-and-mouse. As Hitch­cock said when dis­cussing the film with François Truf­faut, You are deal­ing with space. The length of the shots were to indi­cate the var­i­ous dis­tances that a man had to run for cov­er but it went to show that there was no cover.”

Truf­faut com­ments on the edit­ing length of this sequence, high­light­ing how unusu­al each shot length actu­al­ly is. There’s an unusu­al patience to what becomes an incred­i­bly slow por­tray­al of a fast sequence. We there­fore feel every one of Thornhill’s paces flee­ing from danger.

The crop-duster plane in the dis­tance isn’t the only aspect to fear. Once Hitch­cock has spent sev­er­al shots show­ing Thornhill’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, every­thing becomes a poten­tial men­ace; cars going past could sig­ni­fy Kaplan or worse. When a car, quite inex­plic­a­bly, dri­ves from behind a small patch of crop and drops off a man on the road’s oth­er bus-stop, the scene is at its tens­est. The fram­ing is per­fect with each man on the oth­er side of the road sep­a­rat­ed by the silence between them. The land­scape has turned some­thing incred­i­bly sim­ple into some­thing unnerv­ing; the absurd is in the metrop­o­lis far and away from Thornhill’s cur­rent loca­tion. This is even before the actu­al attack has occurred. The man wait­ing for the bus has a final, eerie omen to share: that the plane is dust­ing where there are, in fact, no crops to dust.

Thorn­hill doesn’t seem to be quite sure what is hap­pen­ing when the plane turns its atten­tions towards him and attacks. He still seems bemused as the plane dives the first two times even though it fires on him on the sec­ond run. By the third, Thorn­hill knows that this is more seri­ous than the usu­al screw­ball real­i­ty of the film. His turn­ing to cam­era with the stut­tered move­ments of his body’s sur­vival instinct kick­ing in is one of Hitchcock’s strongest moments. Grant’s per­for­mance is per­fect in his change of run­ning style. Through­out the film, his run has still been comedic, lanky, wide-eyed. Here it is an expres­sion of bare-faced fear as he runs and takes brief cov­er in a crop.

Soon, how­ev­er, the absur­di­ty will return. The plane will crash clum­si­ly into a pass­ing oil truck with a blast of Hermann’s music once again play­ing. Thorn­hill will dri­ve off back into the absur­di­ty of the metrop­o­lis, in a van with a fridge tied on the back, but, just for these few min­utes, Hitchcock’s famous sense of men­ace crept back in. The iso­lat­ed high­way would nev­er quite be the same again. Every plane, car and per­son was now a foe desir­ing your demise. Yet Hitch­cock knew that this sense was down to the land­scape, the pre­sen­ta­tion of the iso­lat­ed road; and some­thing to be tak­en advan­tage of again the fol­low­ing year when sketch­ing anoth­er pri­vate trap, the high­way of the Bates Motel no less.

North by North­west is re-released UK-wide on 20 Octo­ber as part of BFI Thriller: Who Can You Trust?, which runs from Fri­day 20 Octo­ber to Sun­day 31 Decem­ber at BFI South­bank, online on BFI Play­er and at select­ed UK venues.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.