The Dawn Of Bond When the film was released, Ian Fleming and a couple of co-writers were cobbling together an original screenplay, "Thunderball", meant to introduce Fleming's secret agent James Bond to movie audiences. To their rueful surprise, along came this Hitchcock film that perfectly epitomized what they tried for in their script.......a breezy mixture of espionage, suspense, outlandish action sequences and a suave unflappable, witty hero facing off against a smoothly lethal mastermind. Hmmmm......sounds like a formula, huh? Fleming was especially taken with 'Northwest's idea of an innocent person suddenly swept up into the violent maelstrom of international spying.....a trope he contributed to the preparation of a TV pilot that eventually became "The Man From U.N.C.L.E."
The Bond films did indeed use 'North By Northwest' as their template.....and even specifically paid direct homage to "North By Northwest" in "From Russia With Love". Sean Connery dodging a swooping helicopter served as a knowing tribute to Cary Grant's breathless duel with the Prairie Stop cropdusting plane.
Ernest Lehman's screenplay A diamond sharp, intricately crafted piece of work. The sexual banter between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint on the Chicago Limited train has rarely been equaled by any film writer. Early on, there's even a Cary Grant zinger suitable for use by Trump's various minions.....when he observes that in advertising, there's no such thing as lies.....only expedient exaggerations....
Bernard Herrmann's score The pulsating heart of 'North By Northwest', essentially another character in the movie, musically commenting with either wit, dread or unbridled excitement. There may never have been a greater composer/director collaboration and its undoing during 1966's "Torn Curtain" stood as one of cinema's great tragedies. The irascible Herrmann wouldn't modernize his music as dictated by the studio.......the famously timid Hitchcock, quaking under the foot of his Universal Studios masters, fired Herrmann and settled for a mundane John Addison score that added nothing to an already slack, mediocre film.
A class act..... This element's a little harder to pin down, but the precision of Hitchcock's filmmaking (with every shot preplanned and storyboarded) combined with the director's gentlemanly approach (everyone impeccably dressed, even when they're clambering over Mt.Rushmore) gives the movie an elegant sheen of a more polite, bygone age. It's a long gone, courteous world....."A pleasant journey," villain James Mason quips as his thugs prepare to force a bottle of bourbon down Grant's throat before driving him off a cliff. (A wonderfully ironic moment...... when Mason, the ever so civilized orchestrator of the film's violence, throws a punch at his chief thug (Martin Landau) for breaking the news of Eva Marie Saint's double-agent betrayal, he winces like a thwarted child, his hand and ego equally bruised)
The first gay minion....While Mason's two hitmen seem like ordinary working stiffs, Leonard (Martin Landau) his cadaverous, creepy second-in-command, is something of a slightly effete sophisticate (in imitating Mason's overall attitude, he's the first official Mini-Me),,,,,which didn't sit well with the overseers still trying to maintain the old motion picture Production Code. Hitchcock and Lehman ignored them, devilishly throwing in a line where Leonard boasts of his "woman's intuition".....
Let's hear it for the little people......Reams and reams of overview have already been devoted to Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint.....so we'd like to honor the largely unsung members of the film's large supporting cast........Adam Williams and Robert Ellenstein as Mason's murderous hench-guys. (Everyone assumes Ellenstein's character must have piloted the cropduster, since he disappears halfway through the film).....Jesse Royce Landis, younger than Grant, yet playing his mother.....science fiction regular Les Tremayne playing the art auctioneer flummoxed by Grant's antics designed to bring the police to rescue him.....and speaking of the cops, Tyler McVey and Ken Lynch as the two Chicago officers who apparently get told that Grant's a practical joker rather than an escaped murderer...("You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" McVey snaps).....and of course, the reliable Hitchcock player Leo G.Carroll as the head of.....well, we're not sure what government agency he represents....but we do know that five years later, he bosses the secret agents of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement in that TV show Ian Fleming had a hand in, "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.".......
The BQ could do on and on about "North By Northwest" (as we've stated, our number one fave),so for anyone who's only heard of it and not yet seen it.....by all means head for the multiplex and experience it on a big stereo equipped screen......we guarantee you'll never see a better movie this year or any other.....and we award a one time only, special 6 star rating (******), designating it an ULTIMATE FIND.......Just remember, in the immortal words of Malcolm Atterbury, another of the film's unsung actors....."....that plane's dustin' crops where there ain't no crops....."
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