North by Northwest - 1959

“North by Northwest” (1959), a forerunner of James Bond-type spy action flicks, a witty who-done-it-and-where-is-he, is also, at times, a comedy with style, elegance, sexual innuendo, and trains, sometimes all at once.

It’s the train we’re going to discuss today, now that I’m in withdrawal from my favorite holiday - National Train Day.

And we’ll also talk about the sex. Never have the two been so closely linked.

Today’s post is our contribution to the For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III. This year, the intrepid host trio of Farran Smith Nehme of Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Roderick Heath of This Island Rod are raising funds for the National Film Preservation Foundation's project, The White Shadow, directed by Graham Cutts -- which was “written, assistant-directed, and just generally meddled with in a number of different ways by the one and only Alfred Hitchcock”.

Please visit the three blogs of our hosts for lists of other blogathon participants and contribute if you can to the National Film Preservation Foundation.

In “North by Northwest”, Cary Grant is an advertising executive caught in a web of cold war intrigue and murder when he is mistaken for somebody else. His wit and his charm make for easy transitions to the moments of the film that are by turns elegant, mysterious, and even quite funny. Director Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman skillfully blend all these elements in a delightful way.

There is of course another element, one of suspense, of danger if not outright terror to Grant’s character, who through the course of the film is kidnapped, nearly killed several times, chased by the police as a suspected murderer himself, and dance partner to a homicidal crop duster.

The terror, I think, would be stronger if someone like James Stewart were in the role. Mr. Stewart had the ability, greater than Grant’s, I believe, to convey panic and psychological torment. If Stewart had been the man on the run, we’d worry more about him. Cary Grant, however, has that panache, that confidence in himself that makes us have confidence in him. We somehow know all along he’ll be fine.

He is, however, more fitting for the erotic train sequence than Mr. Stewart, whose vulnerability was part of his own particular charm. Grant shuttles us into the sexy 1960s.  He's more swinger than victim.

In “North by Northwest” the train, though often a place of mystery and even terror in Hitchcock films, instead becomes a safe haven, a place of romance, and at the end of the film is revisited for a happy ending.

Mr. Grant, on the run, and on his way to Chicago, slips aboard the 20th Century Limited in New York. Have a look at our previous trip aboard this famous train in “Twentieth Century” (1934).

The stowaway bumps into Eva Marie Saint in a corridor, where she smoothly diverts the cops who are chasing him. We might wonder why, since they are strangers and she seems not to care that he is wanted by the police. We soon learn she is not all she seems to be. For now, her mystery, like a delicate perfume, fills the train car and that is enough. We are in no great hurry, and neither is she.

Grant encounters her again in the dining car, where their ordering of brook trout invariably invokes for me the scene of Claude Rains’ petulant ordering of brook trout in “Deception” (1946) discussed here.

When you’re in a train dining car today, you still get the tablecloth, the bud vase with the flowers, but if you want a chance encounter with someone like Cary Grant, you’ll have to arrange that beforehand.

Which, it seems, is what Eva Marie Saint and her cohorts did.

Thorough planning is the sure way to a more pleasurable trip.

Though Cary Grant’s patented suaveness leads us to expect a tryst with the lady, it is really Miss Saint who controls the scene with such leisurely, and serene, seduction.

“It’s going to be a long night…and I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started…You know what I mean?”

“Tell me, what do you do besides lure men to their doom on the 20th Century Limited?”

She cups his hand when he lights her cigarette, drawing his fingers close to her lips so she can blow out the match.

We cut to her compartment where he is stuffed into the closed upper berth, hiding while the cops inspect her room. They spend the night together, without us. She will hide him a third time the next morning when she disguises him as a redcap carrying her luggage.

We are always aware of the threat against Grant, racing from the cops, racing against time, but the mystery and the threat is diminished on the train because we are distracted -- by Eva Marie Saint, and by the scenery, some of it quite lovely, passing outside the train. The looming Hudson River following us, the industrial backyards of steel and soot, and the blinding red sunset into which we are flying. Rather than leaving behind the outside world, it comes along for the ride.

Other locations in the movie, the mansion, the hotel rooms, the United Nations Building, even the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial are interesting and evocative -- but they are all mostly sets, and rear screen, and stagy looking. The train, with its controlled closed environment and rear screen scenery, is oddly natural looking, the only part of the film where we find dependable reality. However, here the familiar and ordinary is made exotic with the introduction of sex.

So powerful is the train in this movie that later in the film, when Grant and Saint are clinging to the rocky cliffs in South Dakota, about to plunge to their deaths, he says, “If we ever get out of this alive, let’s go back to New York on the train together…”

“Is that a proposition?” she replies.

Oh, yeah. Trains and romance. It’s the best kind of proposition.

Our final scene, he pulls her up to their awaiting upper berth, once more in the safety, but irresistible intrigue of the train.

“This is silly,” she says.

“I know. I’m sentimental.”

The last shot has the train entering a tunnel. Yes…well. Obvious and sophomoric perhaps, but at least symbolic and not graphic. Hitchcock may lead us around by the nose, but he still expects us to have an imagination.

Have a look at the other blogs participating in this worthy event, and please make your donation below to the National Film Preservation Foundation.