North by Northwest, the comedic follow-up to the tragedy of Vertigo, is a monumental landmark in Hitchcock’s career. It is the first of his American films to end, like a comedy of remarriage, with a romantic couple joined in marriage and unambiguously joyful to be married to each other. Evidently, it took the major part of his career for Hitchcock to achieve—or reconcile himself to—such an ending. When North by Northwest concludes with Roger and Eve about to indulge in the pleasantest perk of connubial life, they have no guarantee that they will live “happily ever after.” This they have in common with the couples of remarriage comedies. Roger and Eve also have in common with these other couples a shared commitment to their ongoing—and witty—conversation and to living each day, and each night, in a spirit of adventure.
It is illuminating to reflect on the path by which Roger and Eve arrive at this perspective. As I have said, in a Hollywood comedy of remarriage, the woman has to undergo a metamorphosis tantamount to dying and being reborn in order for the couple to transform their failed marriage into a relationship worth having. The man may or may not also have to change, but he does not have to undergo so traumatic a metamorphosis. In The Philadelphia Story the man has already changed when he shows up at his ex-wife’s home on the eve of her wedding; arguably, in His Girl Friday and The Lady Eve, the man never really changes. As this asymmetry suggests, there is a measure of inequality in all these “comedies of equality,” as Cavell sometimes calls them. This is one reason, I take it, that he thinks of the genre as exemplifying a stage in the development of the consciousness of women. It is as if the marriage of equals that remarriage comedies envision calls for a kind of man that already exists but a new kind of woman that stands in need of creation—and this despite the fact that in the early 1930s, before It Happened One Night inaugurated the genre, the great stars who were to play the female leads in remarriage comedies were already “new women” in their films. It was the “new man,” worthy of such a woman, who remained to be created (with Cary Grant an exception that proves the rule).
As we have argued, in his films of the early 1930s, Hitchcock, too, was able to bring “new women” to the screen, but it was not until The 39 Steps that a Hitchcock film paired such a woman with a man who was worthy of her. For Hitchcock, too, it was the “new man,” not the “new woman,” who stood in need of creation. But the Hitchcock thriller does not mask this, the way the comedy of remarriage does. Thus a crucial feature that distinguishes North by Northwest from the remarriage comedies Cavell studies is the fact that, as he observes in an essay titled simply “North by Northwest,” in this film it is the man, not the woman, who undergoes a metamorphosis so traumatic as to be tantamount to death and rebirth. In North by Northwest the man’s rebirth requires, symbolically, not only a death but a murder. (He also has to break with his best friend, his mother [Jessie Royce Landis]. This is something the Ralph Bellamy characters in both The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday cannot bring themselves to do.)
In remarriage comedies the threat to marriage is divorce. In the Hitchcock thriller, as we have seen, divorce, which is always provisional, is replaced by murder, which is always permanent—although The Trouble with Harry (1955), in which Harry, the Shirley MacLaine character’s ne’er-do-well husband, keeps popping up like a weed even after he is dead and (repeatedly) buried, casts doubt even on the efficacy of death in terminating a worthless marriage. At the same time, Harry’s corpse seems to fertilize the several romances that spring up after his death.
In North by Northwest Roger’s rebirth is marked by the piece of theater he and Eve perform together, under the Professor’s direction, in which Eve pretends to kill Roger, and he plays dead. Staging a theatrical scene in which she murders him is apt, symbolically. It enables them to put behind them her complicity in sending him to his encounter with the crop-dusting plane that was “dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.” He escaped with his life thanks only to an “accident”—that is, an intervention by Hitchcock—that spared Eve from becoming a “long-range assassin” and finding herself with Roger’s blood on her hands.
To be sure, Vandamm had forced Eve’s hand; not to go along with his plan would have meant blowing her cover as a double agent. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a part of her that wished for Roger to die—not for being a man, exactly, like Elsa’s husband in “Revenge,” but for being, as Eve puts it, the kind of man—his two ex-wives being Exhibits A and B—who “doesn’t believe in marriage.” The couples in remarriage comedies don’t believe in marriage, either, if that means believing in the institution of marriage as it existed in society at the time—believing that what society accepts as marriages are necessarily relationships worth having. Whether there is, or can be, any other kind of man, and any other kind of marriage, are questions North by Northwest poses and then answers in the affirmative.
After Roger learns that Eve had knowingly sent him to what she thought would be his death, he finds himself unable to forgive her. At the art auction, he deliberately, vengefully, arouses Vandamm’s jealousy and places Eve’s life in jeopardy. If Vandamm were to kill her, her blood would be on Roger’s hands as well. He wanted her to die. Roger stands in need of Eve’s forgiveness no less than she stands in need of his, in other words. By the end of the film they forgive one another for the darkness in them that makes them capable of killing, as all human beings are—the darkness whose existence the sponsors of Alfred Hitchcock Presents would have the show deny.
At the end of North by Northwest the Professor—one of Hitchcock’s stand-ins in the film—has no choice but to order a subordinate to shoot Leonard, Vandamm’s henchman. Leonard has responded to Roger’s desperate plea for help—delivered directly at the camera—by sadistically grinding down hard with his shoe on Roger’s hand as he is desperately holding on, with his other hand, to the hand of Eve, who dangles precariously from the sheer face of Mount Rushmore. If the Professor does not intervene, Eve will die, and her blood will be on his hands—and on Hitchcock’s. Through a surrogate “long-range assassin” the film’s author intervenes, not to kill Eve but to rescue her.
Spiritually or morally, there is little to choose between Leonard and the Professor. Poetic justice demands a violent death for Leonard, whereas Hitchcock devises a very different punishment for the Professor. His punishment is to be forced to authorize the shot that kills Leonard, thereby aborting the plot he had so brilliantly scripted. The Professor’s scenario is shattered, like the little African statue that slips out of the dying Leonard’s clutches. The statue breaks into pieces when it falls, releasing the roll of microfilm that had been hidden within its belly, as if the statue had been pregnant with it. This is an ironic, comic, yet elegant image of birth. Allegorically, this is the birth of North by Northwest itself. From the “death” of this statue the film’s ending is born.
Figure 12.1
The Professor had lied to Roger when he promised him that once Vandamm was out of the country, his courtship of Eve would have his blessing. Hitchcock turns the Professor’s lying words against him. As I wrote in “North by Northwest: Hitchcock’s Monument to the Hitchcock Film”: “The shot that kills Leonard and ends the Professor’s game is the means by which Hitchcock declares his authority and confers his blessing on this couple. The Professor proves to be only an unwitting agent of the film’s author, the decoy of the real ‘Professor,’ Hitchcock.”1
Hitchcock refuses to show the Professor or Vandamm the respect he accorded Sebastian at the end of Notorious. After Vandamm chides the Professor for using real bullets (“Not very sporting of you…”), Hitchcock has his camera abandon them both, choosing instead to return to Roger and Eve, still in their desperate straits on the sheer face of Mount Rush-more. For Eve to be saved, the killing of Leonard is obviously necessary. Equally obviously, saving Eve will still require another intervention by the film’s author, another “miracle.” In Vertigo, as we have seen, the opening chase ends with Scottie dangling from the edge of a rooftop, holding on for dear life, with no imaginable way of surviving the incident. It is equally unimaginable that Roger can actually pull Eve to safety; if Cary Grant were holding Eva Marie Saint this way, she would be a goner. The camera frames Eve’s anguished face in close-up as she cries out, “I can’t make it!” When we cut to the reverse shot, Roger says, “Yes you can.”
Figure 12.2
With the camera framing Eve in an even tighter close-up, she says to Roger, “Liar!” She knows that he is lying. She knows that Roger cannot really save her and that Roger knows this, too. And yet, we hear him say, off-screen, and in a changed voice, “Come along…” And when we cut back to Roger as he completes his sentence (“…Mrs. Thornhill”) and succeeds in pulling her up to his side, we realize that the two are no longer on the face of Mount Rushmore; they are in a cozy Pullman compartment. Roger has pulled Eve up to join him in the upper berth so that they can make love.
Retroactively, we can recognize that in the preceding shot of Eve, when her death seemed imminent, the camera framed her so tightly that we could not see whether she was still wearing her orange sweater or was already in the white pajamas she is now wearing—not for long!—on the train. At some indeterminate point within the duration of the close-up, the impossible happens. The “miracle” by which Hitchcock saves Eve takes more than a bullet. It takes the magic of montage. (That montage is a cornerstone of the art of pure cinema is the point Hitchcock made comically, ironically, yet elegantly in the one-sentence speech at the 1976 Lincoln Center tribute to his career. Following an elaborate compilation of his most famous murder scenes, conspicuously including the killing of the would-be murderer in Dial “M” for Murder—the Grace Kelly character, his intended victim, stabs him in the back with a pair of scissors—Hitchcock rose slowly and simply said, “As you can see, scissors are the best way.”)
Equally comically, ironically, yet elegantly, Hitchcock’s camera makes clear the couple’s amorous intent by the famous cut from their passionate embrace to the film’s final image, daringly signifying the consummation of their marriage, of a locomotive penetrating the black hole of a tunnel entrance. The title “THE END / NORTH BY NORTHWEST” is briefly superimposed, before the image fades to black.
This is the ending of the film, but for Hitchcock it heralds a new beginning. That it implies a new beginning for North by Northwest, too, is suggested by the strategies Hitchcock employs to link the film’s ending with its opening title sequence. The film begins—or almost begins, to be more accurate—with the logo of the MGM studio, North by Northwest’s “sponsor.” We are presented with the familiar roaring lion—this is the lion named Tanner, I believe, one of a long line of distinguished felines that goes back at least to the early 1920s, when the employer was Goldwyn, before the merger that created MGM. Within the MGM logo, the lion appears inside a circular frame-within-the-frame made from a strip of film. This circular frame is itself integral to an elaborate, pleasingly old-fashioned design, itself almost entirely made from a film strip, that incorporates the Latin words “ARS GRATIA ARTIS” (art for art’s sake) and “TRADE MARK” (reminders that as far as MGM is concerned, “art for profit’s sake” would be an apter motto).
North by Northwest’s incarnation of the MGM logo has two unfamiliar features, however. One is that the film does not begin with the logo. Rather, it begins the way it ends, with the frame completely black. That the logo emerges out of blackness links this opening with Vertigo’s title sequence. And it links it doubly with North by Northwest’s ending, in which, as we have seen, the fade to black is preceded by the image of the train, carrying the lovers, penetrating the black hole of a tunnel, signifying the consummation of their marriage, upon which the image—abruptly, swiftly, and with the closing chords of Bernard Herrmann’s music decisively underscoring finality as the image of the projected world fades to black. It is as if what comes after the final moment of North by Northwest, when the projected world is engulfed by blackness, is the film’s first moment, the moment the projected world is conjured out of nothingness—as if North by Northwest follows an image of its birth (the microfilm released from the belly of the statue) with an evocation of the moment of its conception.
Figure 12.3
The other unfamiliar feature of the MGM logo, in its North by Northwest incarnation, is that it appears against a green background rather than the customary black one. “For Hitchcock,” as I wrote in The Murderous Gaze, green is “the color of dreams, fantasies, and memories. The perfect love not attainable in today’s world is infused with green in its imagining. When Judy turns into Madeleine before Scottie’s eyes in Vertigo, she is bathed in a soft green light.”2 Even in Hitchcock’s black-and-white films, the color green already possessed such associations. In Shadow of a Doubt, for example, we cannot actually see the green of the emerald in the ring that is Charles’s gift to Young Charlie, but when he speaks of emeralds as the most beautiful things in the world, we imagine the deep, rich green so vividly we all but see it; and it is no accident that Vernon Street was the location of Charles and Emma’s childhood home, the past they both long for with profound nostalgia. Even in the silent Downhill (1927), Hitchcock had the fantasy and memory sequences tinted green.
When the MGM logo fades out, nothing but green fills the frame. Then straight lines begin crisscrossing the screen. First are parallel diagonal lines that mark the green frame with a perfect Hitchcockian ////. Vertical lines begin intersecting with these diagonals. Soon the entire frame becomes a grid. By the principles of linear perspective, the convergence of the lines implies that what is at the right of the frame is more distant than what is at the left, but the evenness of the green background underscores our sense that this is a flat, two-dimensional image—a schematic representation of a three-dimensional space, not a real space with depth.
When the opening credits begin to appear in the frame—some entering from above and some from below—their white letters are parallel to the diagonal. A split second before each credit appears, a white rectangle passes in the opposite direction through the frame, as if it were a counterweight pulling a scaffolding platform into place. This clever touch provides the first inkling of the metamorphosis that the image is about to undergo: a slow dissolve that transforms the grid of black lines on a flat green background into the glass facade of an office building, its surface marked by the same grid. In this mirror are reflected cars and taxis on a heavily trafficked Manhattan avenue. What Heidegger calls “the worldhood of the world” has announced itself. Or has it? After all, this is the world’s mirror image, not the world itself. And the parade of credits continues, until there is finally a slow dissolve to the ground floor of an office building; men and women pouring into the street (from the blackness of the frames-within-the-frame of the building’s doors, yet another linkage with the film’s ending) where they join the hordes of office workers—they might all just as well be wearing the proverbial gray flannel suits—leaving work at the end of the business day.
For a long moment the //// of the grid lingers. At first, we take what we are viewing to be another reflection, as if it were superimposed over the grid, projected onto this simulacrum of the movie screen. By the time the grid vanishes, it seems to have morphed from a mirror into a window through which we are looking into a world on the other side of the grid/screen, a world that has risen up from beneath it, as it were. It is at this moment that North by Northwest “realizes its world,” to invoke an Emerson term, by a transition that is as mysterious, as magical, as the one that transports Roger and Eve—and us—from the face of Mount Rushmore to a cozy Pullman compartment love nest. And it is at this moment that a title card makes the announcement—not really needed, in this case, to avoid libel suits—that the events of the film are “fictitious” and that “any similarity to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.” Oscar Jaffe, the John Barrymore character in Twentieth Century, would call this “the final irony.”
Figure 12.4
Figure 12.5
At the end of North by Northwest’s “fiction,” Roger and Eve have achieved a marriage of equals worthy of a comedy of remarriage. Not coincidentally, Eve, her mission accomplished, has washed her hands of the job that called for her to take marching orders from the likes of the Professor. When Roger escaped from the hospital and set out on his own to claim the woman he loves, he, too, declared his independence from the Professor. Never again will Roger or Eve take part in the murderous games that (today, no less than at the height of the Cold War) threaten America’s soul.
When the Professor informs Roger that Eve is a double agent (in the scene at the airport we considered in the introduction), this onset of knowledge, which is also self-knowledge, engenders a true Emersonian awakening. As we have seen, this awakening, unlike the comparable ones Cary Grant characters achieve in The Philadelphia Story and Notorious, happens onscreen, before our very eyes. Roger opens his eyes to who he is, that is, who he has been, who he no longer wishes to be. He knows why, and how, he must change. And to come into such self-knowledge is to change.
When Leonard tells him of Eve’s duplicity, Vandamm, too, is anguished, as is Sebastian in Notorious when he discovers, as his mother says to him, the “enormity of your stupidity” in marrying Alicia. But Vandamm never awakens to his humanity, as Sebastian does. Vandamm does not feel anguish for Eve. It is only his pride of possession that is wounded. When he cold-bloodedly plots her murder, he is indifferent to her fate. He simply does not care. Roger does. When the Professor informs him that Eve is a double agent, what Roger learns is not that she loves him (for all he knows, he may still be to her just one more of those men in her life who do not believe in marriage). What he learns is that he loves her. He also learns that in his failure to declare his love, he had been, like Devlin, a “fat-headed guy full of pain.” That is not the kind of person he wishes to be. Overcoming or transcending his resistance to change, Roger changes.
Unlike Scottie, whose change comes too late to undo what cannot be undone, Roger, like Devlin, is given—and gives himself—a second chance to free himself from the “private trap” into which he had stepped. And this Cary Grant character—like the Grant characters in The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and The Philadelphia Story, as well as Notorious—rises heroically to the challenge (with the timely help, to be sure, of the “long-range assassin” who kills Leonard). Roger declares his now unconditional commitment, which Eve shares, to their walking together in the direction of the unattained but attainable self.
The ending of North by Northwest reprises the ending of Secret Agent but with a difference. In Secret Agent the Home Office receives a postcard from Richard and Elsa declaring, in effect, that they have exited the world of the Hitchcock thriller and vowing never again to be party to the killing that is one of its defining features. Hitchcock applauds them, but it is from within the world they have repudiated that the camera presents their postcard to us. At the end of North by Northwest, by contrast, Hitchcock’s camera abandons both Vandamm and the Professor—abandons the world of the Hitchcock thriller, I want to say—to mark the consummation of the marriage of this man and woman who—with Hitchcock’s help, and with the help of montage—have escaped that world, never to return.
