North by Northwest

"The fact is that I practice absurdity quite religiously."  Alfred Hitchcock

"The most appealing aspect of that sequence with the plane is that it's totally gratuitous."  Francois Truffaut
Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut (Simon and Shuster,1967)

"Hitchcock's sense of the precariousness of all human order has never been more beautifully expressed."
Hitchcock's Films by Robin Wood (A.S. Barnes & Co.,1965)

"The tone of this film may be light; the moral undercurrents are dark."
The Art of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto (Hopkinson and Blake,1976)

Hitchcock's reputation is always changing but he is still one of the few directors that most people can name.  Film Forum has started its useful series of the complete Hitchcock with North by Northwest, which some see as the summing up of his spy films and some see it as the beginning of a decline.  There are still many who don't like Hitchcock's films because they are manipulative, misogynistic, misanthropic.  I find him to be a brilliant stylist who does not appeal particularly to women; his films are full of male fantasies but they are often undercut.  In North by Northwest, for instance, Cary Grant gets on a train and is seated in a dining car with Eva Marie Saint, a seductive fantasy who flirts intensely with this man she has just met -- of course she is working for the bad guys.  The exteriors and location shots in the film are beautifully done but if the film is marred by anything it is the cheesy studio interiors and the numerous TV actors (Robert Shayne, Edward Platt, et al.) who demonstrate Hitchcock's involvement with his TV show, which ran from 1955 to 1965 and which made him a household name.  His TV show wonderfully ridiculed the required happy ending of the time; many of us who watched it as kids found it quite subversive and seductive.  Certainly the very dark Psycho, which came out the year after North by Northwest, used the TV techniques with great success, but it is questionable whether the effect on Hitchcock's other later films was a good one (though they may have helped to keep him working by keeping his budgets relatively low).  It remains a question whether the use of back projection (even in the plane sequence) and stand-ins (nobody walks like Cary Grant!) irritated audiences of the time or even do so today.

The print Film Forum showed was DCP (digital cinema package), now gradually taking over for 35 mm.  I found this film, in color, a more successful restoration than the print they showed of Citizen Kane, which lacked the warmth and shading of the original 35 mm.  This may simply be the (slight) price we have to pay to keep these films available; it is certainly preferable to 16 mm.