Look, put me down as one of those people that think North by Northwest is overrated. There are too many goofy plot twists to take the story seriously and not enough to make it funny, and it feels like the story has been stretched out about fifteen or twenty minutes longer than it needed to be. But I can’t and won’t argue that the premise is anything other than killer. I have a soft spot for movies that get to their point in three scenes or less, and NbN gets there in two; give us an ordinary person who is clinically incapable of giving a serious answer to anything, and then put them in an infuriating situation that’s not their fault at all.
Those first twenty minutes are really compelling; as Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) drunkenly attempts to escape, I was thinking “ooh, his only way out is drunk driving, but that would inevitably get him caught by police”, and then, of course, that’s exactly what happened, which would force him to investigate further – out of wounded pride if nothing else. On top of this, I was considering how applicable this situation is; despite the vast differences between our income levels, our professions, and our cultural contexts, I could easily imagine what I would and wouldn’t be able to do if I were picked up by assassins and mistaken for a spy.
The interesting thing about Alfred Hitchcock movies is how well they translate despite being rooted very heavily in their specific time and place; the creativity of Hitchcock films is generally less about generating new and fantastic imagery and more about rearranging the details of everyday life into a bizarre new context. Everybody goes to restaurants and trains and tennis matches and auctions, but imagine you were dragged out of one of those things by gunpoint!
The consequence of this is that it’s easy to slip your own details into this situation. Hitchcock movies haven’t aged a day because they spark imagination in a very childlike way; even when one’s mind wanders, it’s sparking off the movie. Grant’s easy charm also helps here; in many ways, blockbuster thrillers still hold to principles of this movie, including that there’s nothing more sympathetic than a smartass in serious trouble.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
The Naked Gun (1988)
In lockstep with Police Squad!, with the slight difference that Frank is much more of a bumbler in these movies – although that ended up making sense, in that the film requires a stronger story, so that it’s funny when Frank succeeds in the end. This also, unlike the show, has two straight men, with both Ricardo Montalban’s villain and Nancy Marchand’s Mayor recognising Frank’s absurdity, even if the former is never quite pushed into acknowledging it.
Subway – revisited this early-ish Luc Besson film that I remembered really loving. Still enjoyed it a lot although now knowing about Besson’s creepiness, there is a plot point that grossed me out a bit. Still an engagingly odd crime-comedy (?) though with the musical subplot being a delight. And Isabelle Adjani showcasing some of the best hairstyles of all time.
Poker Face, “The Hook” – after the highs of the penultimate season one episode, this finale felt a bit “by the book” to me. Solid stuff but it resolves the various hanging plot threads without a ton of character. I’ve had a good time with this show but I definitely don’t find myself in a huge rush to leap into season two.
Seinfeld, “Male Unbonding” through to “The Pony Remark” – five-episode first season? Weird. The storytelling in season two feels a little more ambitious already even though the show is still in its infancy. “The Pony Remark” was probably my favourite episode so far, just consistently funny with every character getting a chance to shine. I’m really enjoying the running gag of Kramer being deeply amused by Jerry’s misfortunes.
Joe Pera Talks With You – I’ve been showing this to my girlfriend as a cultural exchange for Seinfeld, we reached the “Baba O’Riley” episode this morning and I think it lived up to me hyping it relentlessly, possibly the most joyous ten minutes of comedy I’ve ever seen. Some of the episodes that were not as deeply hammered into my brain have been a delight too, the “fall drive” one is absolutely lovely. I’ve already watched the first season a few times but only seen two and three once, so looking forward to revisiting those.
Live Music – one of the local venues held a first birthday gig party that turned out to be a bit of a flop, they assumed they’d sell it out seemingly mostly on goodwill rather than “booking a compelling lineup”, and ended up with a bunch of mid-level local bands and a fairly lacklustre attendance. The one non-local band was my forever favourites Trust Fund though and their set was lovely, with a couple of brand new songs that were fantastic. Shame about the event as a whole though, feels like they should have either worked on booking some more out-of-towners or just filled the day with local favourites and made it free.
Woooo live music! Booo poor planning!
The sheer indignity in “I had a pony!” and Jerry riffing/digging himself deeper right after is amazing.
Woooooo live birthday music!!
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying – the 1967 movie based on the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning musical based on a satirical book of the 50s. This has aged badly given its massive levels of sexism, but it also could have seemed pretty lightweight in a world where The Apartment skewered corporate culture and sexual mores before Robert Morse sang his first note. Morse is very charming in the part, which goes a long way to papering over what a terrible person his character is (and apparently, he’s much worse on stage than in the movie). The songs – fewer than on stage – are by the man who gave us Guys and Dolls, but only a couple come even remotely close to good, so you could this is a Frank Lesser effort. The rest of the cast – most notably Rudy Vallee and Michelle Lee – are solid.
Slow Horses, “Old Scores” – Season two starts with two new exiles in Slough House, two of the old exiles dating seriously, River seeking a job in the private sector, and Jackson investigating the death of a Cold War era agent kicked out just before the Wall came down. This season promises ghosts of the Soviet past and possibly specters of the Russian present, though I think this was filmed before the invasion of Ukraine (despite airing after). Things feel just a bit more self assured than in the first season. Also, somehow I missed till now that the theme song is written and sung by Mick Jagger. It’s not bad but it feels a bit like a Jagger impersonator rather than the real thing.
MASH, “The Kids” – The nearby orphanage is being shelled and the kids seek refuge in the compound. Basically a bunch of vignettes meant to show most of the cast interacting with kids and to tug at the heartstrings. We even get the same gag twice, with BJ and Potter both telling stories to sleepy kids who only speak Korean. But for the most part, it’s effective. Naturally, Frank is immune to the kids, accuses the one kid old enough to be a pain of stealing from him, and inexplicably is flipping out while literally everyone else is in surgery. The writers seems to be going to ever greater lengths to make Frank seem awful. Conversely, this one further humanizes Margaret. I wonder if by this point, they were thinking about the big changes to come for her.
Frasier, “The Dinner Party” – Obviously any dinner party thrown by Frasier and Niles will go humorously wrong. But instead of waiting for the party to happen, things go wrong during the 22 minutes they decide to have the party, start to make the arrangements, and realized that it isn’t going to happen. Oh, and along the way the brothers start to wonder if they spend too much time together. This takes place entirely in Frasier’s apartment in real time, even including the closing credits, and works mainly because of how well it uses the brothers Crane.
MLB, Dodgers vs Padres – It was “all out of town games are free” weekend again, possibly for the last time since ESPN is buying MLB.tv and likely to shove it into their new streaming service. I am sure making games more expensive and less accessible will do wonders for baseball. For now, a chance to watch two good teams.
Oops. Wrong title for Slow Horses. Should be “Last Stop.”
The musical is unseen by me, but there’s a song “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm” that is clearly skewering gender roles as well: “oh, to be loved by a man I respect/To bask in the glow of his/Perfectly understandable neglect.” The movie sands down those rough edges to its detriment. Still Morse has to be giving one of the weirdest lead performances pre-New Hollywood. The way he close talks to people is really funny, and something Burt Cooper would never do.
That song was left out of the movie. More’s the pity. (Michelle Lee’s overall role is reduced greatly, even with the one song they added for her.)
I only know Morse from here and from his award-winning one man Truman Capote play (it aired on PBS and gave him an Emmy to go with his Tony). He’s clearly talented, and I can see why he thrived on Broadway for years. (Yeah, I know, I should watch Mad Men.)
Babylon 5 — oh goody, an extended gag about the Post Office! And King Arthur is here! This part leads to some potentially interesting stuff down the road with G’Kar, a guy increasingly on a holy crusade, but the show needs to get off goofy mode.
The Last Boy Scout — rewatch with inklings of a plan for later, for now this remains very enjoyable but also clearly lesser Shane Black, dicking around with noir and buddy comedy stuff without the commitment of Lethal Weapon or Nice Guys or Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or perhaps most germanely Long Kiss Goodnight, another blockbuster action version that has real pain instead of Bruce Willis using bad standup comedy to get out of jams (multiple times!). Darkly hilarious how hard Halle Berry gets owned here but this points to a real disinterest in digging into tropes and instead just blowing through them.
A Place In The Sun — speaking of noir, this shades into horny murder territory in uncomfortable ways. Clift is a piece of shit in many respects, he fucks up and doesn’t own it because he is more interested in fucking Elizabeth Taylor (although who among us) and moving up in the world, and while this is of course wrong the movie doesn’t exactly deny the appeal of his doomed love. George Stevens wilds out with dissolves throughout here, people’s faces bleeding into each other or across scenes as their desires can’t be contained, and Clift is a guy whose desires are ultimately circumscribed by class — the movie is incredibly good at delineating this casually, just depicting the two worlds he’s got a foot in without beating you over the head with it, that beating is saved for Raymond Burr’s real piece of shit DA, a guy who knows who he serves. But none of this works as well as it does without Shelly Winters, who is not a plaster saint (and who is fucked far worse than Clift in terms of societal restriction, that scene with the doctor is brutal) and whose neediness is infuriating at points, including up to the point of no return. No wonder Clift wants out.
I haven’t seen A Place in the Sun since film lit class o those many years ago, and now I really want to revisit it.
The Last Boy Scout is definitely weaker Shane Black, but that hilarious, jaw-dropping football game at the beginning is a classic for a reason. (I mean, it makes no sense in a thousand different ways, but it’s so wild that I love it anyway.)
That football game was the reason for the rewatch! And it was better than I remembered, “Friday Night’s A Great Night For Football” is incredibly catchy and the whole sequence is a perfect encapsulation of MNF. The end game is good too! Poor Taylor Negron, you deserved a better movie but at least you were blenderized by a helicopter.
“And King Arthur is here!”
Yeah, sure, why not
Favorite part of A Place in the Sun is Paul Frees (voice actor for Rocky and Bullwinkle, Disney, etc.) suddenly showing up as a priest in the end. Real, “Wait, is that…?” moment
Ahhh, his voice did sound familiar!
The Big Lebowski
What’s to say that hasn’t been said a thousand times? An excellent movie that falls into the rare category of “entertainment where every scene is actively trying to entertain you (and succeeding).” Funny as hell, with great performances–the film is so much richer for having people like PSH in minor roles, because if you want to make a comedy, cast someone who can make opening double doors hilarious. I quote this way too often.
My wife, who is better at ranking things than I am, puts this in her top three movies of all time, along with Gosford Park and Zodiac, and I just wanted to share that because I think it’s an excellent top three.
Don’t Come Knocking
For Movie Club. This is the kind of (heavily) flawed movie that makes for fun discussion, so even though its weaknesses stand out as clear as day when it’s held up alongside its near-relative, Paris, Texas, it led to a really good talk. But it feels formulaic and too easy, far more sanitized and anodyne than a Wim Wenders/Sam Shepard collaboration should. Nice to see Eva Marie Saint–in a tie-in to our host article!–and a George Kennedy cameo, though.
Company
PBS broadcast of the Raul Esparza production. I asked Conor for recommendations for a first Sondheim, and he knocked it out of the park by pointing me towards this, which I adored. I might have to pick up a DVD copy for keeps, especially since the YouTube version was fuzzy and quickly got out-of-sync on the audio. This is magnificent, with a ton of power and humor and acerbic satire (a subsection of the humor it’s worth separating out here), and Esparza makes an incredible Bobby with a show-stopping “Being Alive.” This could easily fall into the category of art that’s about (heterosexual) marriage as testy and miserable, and I can see people feeling like it still does, but it actually feels like it engulfs that perspective and, at least by the time we hit “Being Alive,” comes across more as “marriage is a microcosm of life and human connection, with all the good and bad that implies.” I feel a lot happier in my marriage on a daily basis than most of these characters seem to, but Company talks me around into believing in their weird, prickly, flawed relationships anyway. Maybe they’ll separate, maybe they’ll get divorced (and stay together, happier than ever), maybe they’ll make it work, whatever–they’re all trying, and they all care to some degree, and I care about them in return.
Also, there’s no problem here that couldn’t be either solved or made entertainingly worse by everyone having an orgy, so clearly some offbeat polyamorous theater collective should end it that way someday.
Bend It Like Beckham
I had never seen this, but it came up in the Screen Drafts ’00s Sports Movies episode, and I knew it’s a bit of a lesbian classic (though one without an actual on-screen lesbian relationship), all of which was intriguing to me. I enjoyed it–light and fun and funny, with some genuine emotional stakes–but never quite fell in love with it. And actually, while I liked our leads a lot, I think my two favorite moments were actually with supporting male characters: Tony’s idiosyncratic, believably downplayed coming-out (“I really like Beckham”) and Jess’s dad finally playing cricket again at the end.
Scrubs, “My Fifteen Minutes,” “My Case Study,” and “My Screw Up”
Still just hopping around watching old favorites.
“Where do you think we are?” is still one of my top TV lines, which led me and my wife into a discussion of great Wham Lines, per TV Tropes.
Oh I keep meaning to watch Gosford Park! I definitely should now that it’s a top-three movie of all time (for one particular person (who likes Big Lebowski a lot more than I do)).
It’s fantastic–smart and bitter and layered–and is not at all like The Big Lebowski, if that helps.
I love a murder mystery and I’m a big fan of later-era Altman (more than the 70s classics, for some reason) so it sounds way up my street. And I do like Big Lebowski, for the record, it’s just never been one of “my” movies – it only just scrapes into my Coens top 10, although to be fair they do have about 15 great movies.
This is often my response to love triangles, even semi-jokingly! “Why don’t you form a triad?” But I’m so glad you liked it, and I think the staging here is really triumphant. Director John Doyle has been criticized and teased for resorting to the same trope of characters/actors playing the instruments live, and here it forms this beautiful narrative function of letting Bobby become an active player in his own life.* (Chills when he begins the first chord.)
*One subtext I did read which I thought was interesting is that he’s a reflection of where Sondheim was in life as a middle-aged gay man and this is a coded portrayal.
I’ve often advocated for that love triangle resolution too!
I didn’t know that was a trope of Doyle’s, but I certainly really liked it here–as you said, it works thematically, as a newbie coming across it for the first time, it’s also just very cool visually.
I can absolutely see the notion of gay-coded Bobby, and I think it works really well with the specific way he gets flustered when Peter makes him a not-so-subtle offer; it reads differently from how he pulls back from April but doesn’t feel like offense or disgust, either, especially when he’s already said he’s had a gay experience as an adult. Esparza plays it like he’s afraid of saying yes or even thinking too much about it. And Bobby seeing all his friends’ relationships but being constantly unsure of how to participate–wanting that for himself, but not in a way that necessarily looks like this–all works really for this reading.
Hmm, all detective stories…no wonder she fell for the mystery writer!
Welcome to the Sondheim Club! My introdcution was Sweeney Todd, which seems like it’d be right up your alley. Doesn’t hurt that it’s so close to sung-through you can follow the whole thing just from the cast album.
Now that I think about it, I suppose Sweeney Todd was my first actual Sondheim exposure, via the Burton movie, but that feels too heavily Burton get the full Sondheim effect; I should look up a stage production or listen to a cast album!
Even though she’s already seen it on Netflix, I took my daughter to see K-POP Demon Hunters (the sing-along version). While I wasn’t looking forward to it at first, once the songs came on and most of the theater started singing along, it was a lot of fun. The songs are very catchy and the movie is frequently funny and moves at a quick pace. I can see a lot of KPOPDH Halloween costumes this year. (I hope they have one in my size).
Dammit, when is Netflix going to put The Irishman back in theaters for a sing-along version?
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
I can’t judge this objectively, so this is pretty much gonna be one of those old AV Club “[Comic] Book vs. Movie”-type reviews.
To elaborate: the first Marvel comic I ever read was a big black-and-white “Essentials” collection my art teacher lent me with the original Kirby-Lee “The Coming of Galactus” story and a year or two of the issues leading up to and following on from it. And it blew my mind: I remember thinking, oh, so this what people mean when they say a story’s “exciting.” First Steps is a very direct, but very loose, adaptation, which I normally don’t mind — it’s not like the awkward 60s-comic writing didn’t leave room for improvement — but every change is a downgrade. What neither movie version understood is the heart of the story isn’t the Fantastic Four, it’s the Silver Surfer and Alicia Masters, the Thing’s ordinary, human love interest. Both characters get sidelined in this version; Alicia’s not even in it, despite rumors Natasha Lyonne would play her. (Lyonne’s still, barely, there, as a new love interest, erasing Alicia’s blindness. She’s still one of the biggest names in the cast, and I have to wonder how much her role was cut down.) Kirby and Lee built the core of the story about this ordinary woman’s kindness convincing an alien demigod that humanity was worth saving. The Surfer still turns turncoat and turns the battle in humanity’s favor, but what made for the climax of the comic has no weight in the movie. Johnny just lays a guilt trip on her, she disappears from the movie for a long-ass time. When she finally shows up to take out Galactus, it’s so brief and has so little emotional resonance it means nothing.
The power of The Coming of Galactus is that it’s not really a superhero story: Galactus is so overwhelming the hero’s powers mean nothing, and they’re only saved by the intervention of a higher power. First Steps gestures at that feeling of helplessness, but it’s ultimately a standard story of hypercompetent individuals saving the world. It’s bizarre that filmmakers who cite 2001 as a primary influence would have so little interest in the Human Torch’s own journey beyond the infinite and existential crisis (“We’re just ants! Ants!”) The only moment that approaches the power of Kirby or Kubrick’s visions is Galactus’ introduction. AFter that, he’s just another big, scary supervillain (points to Ralph Ineson’s performance though.)
Honey Don’t
Another one that couldn’t live up to expectations; it feels like Ethan Coen’s doing a bad impression of himself here. I always wondered why he and Joel always got the best cinematographers even for lowbrow comedies like Burn After Reading or O Brother Where Art Thou? but it’s obvious now. This looks like cheap streaming filler and that affects everything else. Even one of the best scenes, where Honey tells her dad, “You’re already dead. No one told you?” is shot so indifferently it barely lands.
Speaking of bad impressions, Coen has a hard time getting the right note of stylized noirish archaism from the cast. Margaret Qualley is excellent of course, but she’s the exception, not the rule. I remember laughing when Charlie Day greats her by shouting, “Well, well, well!” to the cheap seats, and then groaned when I realized he was going to read every line like that. Coen Brothers movies play a tricky game with viewers’ expectations, and Honey Don’t shows how hard that is to do without just dropping a bunch of anticlimaxes.
What did we play?
Ori and the Blind Forest – glad I stuck with this, as the difficulty ramped up and I gained more abilities to navigate the tricky levels, I really fell in love with it. The weak combat is definitely the one flaw but becomes less of an issue as the game goes on, clearly the effort went into the exciting platforming and telling an emotional story without too much text and that stuff all holds up beautifully. Finished it just now and will definitely be playing the sequel, although I guess I’ll spice things up with something else first.
Balatro – ONE deck stake left to complete and then I’m at 100% on everything apart from the fairly ridiculous “win with every single joker” stat which I’m content to ignore. Probably. Absurdly addictive game.
The Ori games are fun; I played through them a couple of years ago. I’m pretty sure the sequel is a longer game, but my Steam says I played the first one longer, so I’m not sure what happened there unless I played through it twice.
Hollow Knight is still the king, though, if you haven’t played it. (If you haven’t, now would be a good time so you can be prepped for Silksong.)
Oh yeah don’t worry, I’m all up to speed on Hollow Knight. In fact I wonder if it’s the buzz around Silksong finally happening that had me in the mood for some metroidvania action! Won’t quite believe it’s actually coming out until it does, though…
The Curse of Strahd has plunged into the past as we meet Strahd as a young non-vampiric man who is actually even worse as a callow prince than as a vampire lord. I really do wonder what would happen if we just killed him now. Probably not much, or at least nothing good.
Don’t Starve
With the Reign of Giants DLC turned on. I’ve played a bunch of this in Survival mode but have never made it all the way through Adventure mode, which has the win conditions, and I thought, “Maybe now’s the time,” so I started a new game with grand plans of building a base and making it through several grueling seasons and then actually finishing it all this time … and then my laptop’s charging ports stopped working and the Apple Store is saying it’ll be at least a week before I can use my laptop again. So that’s all on hold.
But Don’t Starve is one of my favorite video games, even though I tend to fuck around in it instead of playing it to completion. I love the Gorey/Burton-esque artwork, I love how genuinely creepy parts of it (the shadow monsters that leak into the frame when your character’s sanity is too low), I love how brutal its survival mechanics can be. I’m having an especially hard time on this playthrough because it started me off in spring, which meant I was constantly getting caught in deluges, with wet clothes lowering my morale because it took me a while to get what I needed to make a proper umbrella, and then I was all too quickly in summer, where the blazing, debilitating heat is a lot less easy to manage than winter’s chill. This is why I almost tweaked the settings to start me off in autumn instead, but in the end, the only alteration I made was to give me more regeneration points. (I know it’s a rougelike, but here’s the thing: I don’t actually like dying and losing hours upon hours of progress, so if the game is willing to give me some more cushioning there, I’m happy to take it.)
Anyway, this is a rich, complex, difficult, fun, beautiful to look at game that I’d recommend to anyone whose laptop is actually working.
Lunar: The Silver Star Remastered – I didn’t really feel like pushing further in Hollow Knight (not that there’s much further to push at this point), and rather decided to play something where I wouldn’t have to be too attentive or use my killer reflexes. Something relaxing.
Anyway, the Lunar games had always interested me since I first heard about them, although I didn’t have a way to play them for a long time. I remember trying a playthrough on a Sega CD emulator years ago, although I started to struggle at a certain point and ended up putting it down. Well, I couldn’t find that save file, but I did find a remastered version of The Silver Star and Eternal Blue on Steam, so I started that! Only about three hours in now. But I’m having fun and it’s got a good sense of humor and I’m trying not to make myself get hooked on the “just a little more…” aspect at the end of the day so far (and mostly failing). Anyway, a nice little way to relax when I need to.
Plus: the iconic scene with the biplane, and the almost as iconic scene with Mount Rushmore
Minus: what are the odds that anyone has a house on top of Mount Rushmore?
I agree that you can’t take this seriously, but it’s such a delightful romp that I don’t care. Your last point about how well it sparks the imagination is definitely one of the biggest draws for me.
Cary Grand and Eva Marie Saint are so ridiculously charming here, too, and they have incredible sexual chemistry; James Mason, who’s become one of my favorite classic Hollywood actors, is iconic as the villain even though half his plans make zero sense.
Great drunk driving in thrillers: Dick Francis’s Forfeit has a spectacular scene where the protagonist is forcibly intoxicated in a situation where he urgently needs to connect his paralyzed wife’s oxygen (IIRC) and get her to the hospital, and it’s one of my favorite sequences in all of Francis (and I like Francis very much).
I’m not sure whether I consider this one overrated or not, there are certainly “wrong man” Hitchcock films that I think do it better but I also think this one is pretty wonderful. But (and I’ve probably mentioned this before on here) I’m in the slightly odd position of Hitchcock being one of my most watched directors (Letterboxd says I’ve seen 31 of his films) but there isn’t a single one I’ve seen more than once. I can imagine some of the jumps in logic here being more frustrating after multiple viewings than they were on my one-time watch.
It’s my favorite Hitchcock. It’s lightweight. It doesn’t have a deep reading or the symbolism of other Hitchcock films, unless it’s Mount Rushmore and the train going in the tunnel at the end. But it’s the first one I remember watching as a kid with my mom. Also, it was around the time I became aware of James Bond. That series, at least film wise, owes quite a bit to this one in their light tone (especially the Moore era), plot twists and stunt sequences.
While PSYCHO ushered in a new era of cinematic sensationalalism, and VERTIGO has become the object of cinephile obsession, but NORTH BY NORTHWEST codified the key details of the espionage wish-fulfillment drama; namely, The modern spy as a corporation man blessed with a glibness of manner and competence of task.
Year of the Month update!
This September, we’re covering these movies, albums, books, from 1938!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Bringing Up Baby
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rebecca
Sept. 22nd: Sam Scott: Holiday
And there’s still time to sign up for 1959 this month. Check out all these movies, albums, books, et al
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Pillow Talk/Some Like It Hot
Aug. 27th: Lauren James: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Aug. 28th: Cliffy73: Sleeping Beauty
Aug. 29th: Gillian Nelson: The Monorail
“the creativity of Hitchcock films is generally less about generating new and fantastic imagery and more about rearranging the details of everyday life into a bizarre new context.”
While this is true of Hitchcock’s films from the beggining, the earlier films relied on expressionistic lighting, obtrusive camera placement and design to enhance the bizarreness of their context and as a means of generating unease. While NORTH BY NORTHWEST presents a generally flatter visual palette (excepting the overhead angles representing Thornhill’s POV at Van Damme’s modernist mansion) I’d argue that locations are themselves ironically used in contrast to their iconic status–They are symbols of American largesse that reflect the duplicitous enterprise maneuvering under their shadow.
Thornhill may not be the man that he is mistaken for, but his immersion in the superficial glibness of corporate culture makes him a perfect spy, competent at fleetingly presenting an image of someone he is not for temporary advantage. His gullibility at times forces him to identify with people being fleeced, but his own prowess at deceptive image making reveals his own stakes in the game of advertising, and in using iconographic imagery to influence behavior. The “O” in the characters middle initial stands for nothing, and outside of protesting his innocence, there is little sense of an identity that isn’t linked to performative hustling. While essentially a spy thriller, NORTH BY NORTHWEST is an elegantly sustained satire of American manners (and hype) and the manipulation of behavior behind the nation’s projection of confidence and power.