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

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.