North by Northwest
I said, awhile back, that I’d be watching and writing about Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense movies: not the gory ones, not the birds-plucking-your-eyes-out ones or the chocolate-syrup-down-the-shower-drain ones, but the ones cat-burglar ones, the chase ones, and the action-packed ones. I said I didn’t want to watch anything scary. I didn’t want to be afraid to go to bed with the lights off.
Technically, in this world of Saw and The Ring and The Grudge, North by Northwest qualifies as a non-scary movie. Nobody’s being haunted (in the literal sense), and there’s nothing going bump in the night—Cary Grant is far too suave for that, anyway. But in another sense, the oh no this could happen to me sense, it’s—what’s the word?—terrifying. It’s the story of an innocent man getting the wrong end of the mistaken-identity stick, of being hunted and of having nobody to trust. It’s probably not the first film of its kind, but it’s the best-known, and hundreds of movies (anybody seen Eagle Eye?) have since paid tribute to it. It’s a groundbreaker in the area of unknowing fear.
On the other hand, you’d think an action-suspense film of this variety would move a little faster. Pacing is North by Northwest’s downfall, if it has one: Hitchcock crams a lot of scenes in, but doesn’t cut anything down to compensate. Many of the important scenes are ridiculously long, and not because they’re building in suspense; the Grant/Eva Marie Saint seduction scene, for example, goes on for so long that the tension actually begins to loosen up. The famous airplane-crossroads scene also runs longer than is strictly necessary, and while the ending of that scene is fantastic, you get the feeling that Hitchcock was feeling just slightly self-indulgent in the editing room. And maybe he’s right, in a way; they’re good scenes, and maybe he’s right to show off a bit. But he might have done better to pare things down to their essences. It’s a flabby movie, is what it is, and just a pinch here and a pin there might have done the trick.
Coming up: More pre-Halloween Hitchcock!
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