FILM IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 9 3 R F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R The man is in a fix. The cabbie doesn’t do anything to make it better. ‘‘Where to?’’ he asks. ‘‘I don’t know,’’ says the man. ‘‘Just keep going.’’ ‘‘Right.’’ No, ‘‘I need a destination.’’ No, ‘‘Make up your mind, Mac.’’ The driver knows his job. He waits. The man has an idea. ‘‘Take me to the United Nations.’’ ‘‘Right,’’ says the cabbie. ‘‘General Assembly building,’’ says the man, now confident he’s found a course of action. ‘‘Right.’’ The man, who’s been glancing nervously out the back window, guesses that he’s in good hands and explains his problem. ‘‘I’m being followed. Can you do anything about it?’’ A flicker of pride enters the driver’s voice, ‘‘Yes I can.’’ ‘‘Do it,’’ says the man. And it’s done. It’s 1959. We’re in a Manhattan taxi in the midst of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The man is Cary Grant (‘‘Roger 1 9 4 T A Y L O R Y Thornhill’’), on his way to the U.N. to find the o≈cial who can tell him why he was kidnapped and nearly killed the night before. It won’t be a very productive visit. Cary will wind up on the run, framed for murdering the very man he sought for answers, needing more help than a no-nonsense hack can provide. That’s where America steps in. North by Northwest is Hitchcock’s most American movie, and it’s the kind of American movie that only a transplant could make. Hitchcock turned his favorite scenario – ordinary man caught up in extraordinary circumstances – into an immigrant’s fantasy of the immensity of America. City avenues, skyscrapers, train stations , cropland, tourist restaurants, forests – all are enormous, the way the Lower East Side immigrant grocery store in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America would later be big enough to stage Rigoletto in. Abetted by Grant, another American transplant , Hitchcock depicted a country so vast you could run and run and run, take train and bus and plane, and never get to the end of it. Cary is on the move for the entire picture and still only makes it as far as South Dakota. By the end of the movie he’s hanging o√ Mt. Rushmore, literally dwarfed by the national iconography. There’s another story in North by Northwest, one contained in that exchange with the cabbie, and it’s a story that lurked around the edges of American movies for years, though it’s now fading away. This is the story of what you might call American convenience , the perks of life on the go, the casual competence we came to expect whenever we set foot outside the door. These days, when life is a constant temptation not to leave the house, when we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we’ve found a way for the world – and not just its goods – to come to us, the ordinary transactions and details that make up that story look pretty good. In North by Northwest trains play a big part in that convenience . Grant’s first stop as a fugitive is Grand Central Station and the Twentieth-Century Limited. He’s a stowaway, but, being Cary Grant, he’s an exceptionally presentable one. Anyone who has ridden Amtrak lately and found that a cocktail consists of a plastic cup, a nip, and a can of mixer, and a meal amounts to a choice of microwaved pizza or sandwiches with the taste refrigerated out of them would envy Cary’s ability to order a Gibson – served in a proper cocktail glass – before enjoying his brook trout. When Eva F I L M I N R E V I E W 1 9 5 R Marie Saint (‘‘Eve Kendall’’) informs him that it’s going to be a long night and she doesn’t particularly like the book she’s reading, it invites another kind of envy. Even life on the run...