North by Northwest (1959)

Sophisticated paranoia — and things go asplode

Sometimes I go on YouTube and I’m impressed by the AI videos people are able to make. Take a blockbuster action franchise, for example, but make it into a film trailer from the 1950s with grand midcentury architecture shot in VistaVision. Take the action movie tropes that would be considered generic from the 1980s on forward: big budgets, large crowds, sweeping views, epic scenery, vehicle explosions, car chases, trains, planes, hanging over the edge of a cliff, and dialogue that's racier than what you would expect from the Hays Code era.

No need to look for fake 1950s AI crossover videos — Alfred Hitchcock codified much of the modern action genre in 1959 with North by Northwest.

The movie is such an interesting hybrid of the new blockbuster action tropes that would be, along with Hitchcock’s already familiar style as a well-established director by that time.

A couple aspects of the familiar Hitchcock style are the mistaken identity, “You’ve got the wrong man!” sort of plot, along with a general sense of paranoia.

Right from the famous Saul Bass intro sequence, you’ve got the disorienting diagonal lines and the unnaturally synchronized motion of the crowds:

That unnatural synchronization of the crowds is not just an aesthetic choice — it ties in with the actual storyline, where some guy minding his own business ends up being on the run with the surrounding society turned against him. There’s no supernatural or extraterrestrial mechanism like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers — it’s just pure social manipulation.

Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is a middle-aged ad executive who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when a group of mysterious people decide he is a completely different person, “George Kaplan,” who — as it turns out — doesn’t even exist. He is kidnapped by them for the crime of being this person who only lives in their imaginations, but instead of straight-up murdering him and leaving evidence, they instead force him to get drunk and drive. That way, he either dies in an “accident,” or he survives at the cost of his credibility and reputation. Of course, nobody is going to believe him that he was targeted by a well-organized mob for no apparent reason, and with no provocation — and they’ve engineered things so insisting on his innocence makes him look crazy, and resisting makes him look like the bad guy.

It’s a relatable premise. If you get it, you get it. If you’ve ever been somebody’s scapegoat, or if you’ve seen it play out in online drama. And Hitchcock gets the weirdness of human nature beneath the veneer of order.

Roger spends the first part of the movie trying to negotiate with the idea that society will see the truth and protect him, but he falls through the cracks anyway. His own mother (Jessie Royce Landis) thinks he’s being silly, even as she humors him at first by accompanying him on his investigations to clear his own name and figure out who “George Kaplan” is. Maybe it was less so in the 1950s, maybe it was a more high-trust society back then, but at least nowadays Roger comes across as extremely naïve. His open attempts to make things right just make him even easier to frame, to the point where he is photographed and implicated for murder in major newspapers across the country.

Roger seems a little immature, too: a middle-aged man who already has a couple of failed marriages under his belt and seems overly reliant on his aging mother (although it’s hard to tell how old the characters are actually supposed to be, given that there was only eight years age difference between the actors Grant and Landis). Again, maybe it was a different time period back then, but “mother issues” are a recurring theme for Hitchcock, and it felt really cringe seeing the protagonist drag his elderly mom into investigating and getting close to the same people who had just tried to kill him, and whom he had barely escaped from himself. Maybe it was to underscore the idea that Roger himself was in denial that his experiences were real, that he really just wants to believe his mother that the entire thing was silly and all in his head.

But then another encounter with the bad guys forces him to flee by himself, and there is no going back on the reality of the situation…

Here Be Spoilers

Thornhill sneaks onto a passenger train and just happens to meet Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), a much younger woman who wants to shag him right then and there just because. Even after all Thornhill has been through, he does not find this coincidence at all suspicious — it’s been established that he’s just naïve and trusting, like Disney’s Hercules was naïve and trusting for Megara. And also, he’s someone who is used to a normal life with social support, and now is in a situation where he is suddenly alone, and here is the only person in the whole crowded movie who appears to empathize with him.

Kendall saves Thornhill from his pursuers, only to later give him directions to the middle of nowhere where the famous crop duster scene happens:

With this betrayal, Thornhill realizes the situation is even more complicated than he thought. He’s been caught in the middle of a spy vs. spy drama between the fictional “United States Intelligence Agency” and enemy agents from an unspecified foreign country. (No real U.S. intelligence agencies or Cold War Soviet Bloc governments were harmed.) On the enemy side are Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) and Leonard (Martin Landau) and on the United States side is “The Professor” (Leo G. Carroll). Eve Kendall, who appears to have fallen for Thornhill for real, is a mystery — whose side is she on, really? She’s a classic “Shapeshifter” according to the Chris Vogler Writer’s Journey archetypes.

Ultimately, Thornhill’s persistence, boldness, and curiosity pay off. So does leaning even more into his own earnestness. Instead of keeping his head down, trying to fit in and persuade, he causes a scene at an art auction that works into his own designs. Maybe it’s the ad man in him, but he is regaining control of the narrative — becoming a chess player, not just a chess pawn.

It turns out that Kendall had inadvertently fallen in with the foreign spies when she was younger, then was recruited by the United States government to be an informant, and Thornhill agrees to protect her cover as a double agent who was with the good guys all along. Having figured out what is going on, and now in The Professor’s good graces, Thornhill has the option to just cooperate with him and return to a normal life even if it means leaving Kendall to a bad fate as the mistress of some overseas spy. Kind of like the bad ending of a video game — sure, you survive it, you technically beat the thing, but you don’t go the extra mile to get the true ending.

Thornhill, though, goes the extra mile. He parts ways with The Professor when he is unwilling to let Kendall be collateral damage, and goes to save her before the villains can fly out of the country, where they are to depart from the vicinity of Mount Rushmore. If the bad guys are sneaky and manipulative, Thornhill can be sneaky too! The stakes are raised — the bad guys are on to Kendall and plan to kill her after they depart, and the sculpture from the art auction contains some microfilm they are smuggling out of the country.

The literal cliff-hanger abruptly cuts to Thornhill and Kendall, now a happily married couple, on a rail car bed. Then the train goes into a tunnel. Very Beavis and Butt-Head level of humor, not very subtle — but then again, North by Northwest invented a lot of the tropes that were old hat by the 1990s. Alfred Hitchcock’s movies may be known for their dark and depressing themes, but North by Northwest as a crowd-pleasing epic action thriller — with a protagonist persevering through all the obstacles thrown at him — was always working toward a light-hearted, happy ending.