In America, where the romantic view of marriage has been taken more seriously than anywhere else, and where law and custom alike are based upon the dreams of spinsters, the result has been an extreme prevalence of divorce and an extreme rarity of happy marriages.
—Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals1
FROM THE OPENING DIALOGIC EXCHANGE in Hitchcock’s cross-country thriller North by Northwest (1959), marriage functions as a leitmotif. As Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) emerges from the elevator of his Madison Avenue office high rise, in medias res and dictation to his secretary, he tosses “How’s the wife?” to the elevator attendant Eddie, who replies “We’re not speaking.” Thornhill, clearly a serial multi-tasker in business and women, grins wryly, breaking neither stride nor stream of words. Without missing a beat, his next dictum to Maggie (Doreen Lang) affirms a piece of corporate one-upmanship, followed by instructions for a palliative gift of gilt-wrapped candy to a paramour who’ll “think she’s eating money” (Lehman 3). Thornhill handles both the corporate and the carnal transaction with the same ironic distance he showed toward Eddie’s domestic woes. There is no meeting of hearts or minds in any part of Thornhill’s world, although he is clearly a skilled broker of business and personal unions. While not unaware of his responsibilities—“I’ve got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders waiting for me” (Lehman 129), he later announces to the Professor—Thornhill’s relations are more facile than familial. Indeed, his dismissive attitude toward marriage is the stuff of midcentury jokes from Peter Arno’s cartoons in The New Yorker, reflecting the urban sophisticate’s casual attitude toward the trappings of postwar success, one of which was traditional marriage. Yet this film compulsively circles the subject of marriage, keeping it in view if not in center frame throughout. Positioned between Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), North by Northwest was in pre-production when Alma Hitchcock was diagnosed and treated for cervical cancer (McGilligan 559). The potential loss of his artistic and life partner was a staggering blow to Hitchcock, and may well have shaped his portrait of marriage in his next feature film.2 The Hitchcocks had a highly successful companionate marriage based on complementary but distinctive talents. While at the outset Roger Thornhill may be a man who doesn’t believe in marriage, and Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) may be an independent moral and double agent, Roger and Eve find their way by plane, train, and automobile to a partnership similar to that of the Hitchcocks. The philosophy of marriage in North by Northwest is a singularly democratic one: a volitional union of equals, hard-won by strife and commitment to an idea greater than themselves. A more perfect union, as it were.
In Marriage and Morals (1929) Bertrand Russell celebrated the post–World War I relaxation of nineteenth-century social and cultural mores. Russell advocated mutuality of relations, both sexual and social, between men and women as simple common sense in the modern world. His moral philosophy is grounded in utilitarianism. With reliable birth control to free both parties from obligatory marriage, the greater good is served by openness about human desire and companionability. Impartiality and self-awareness are cornerstones of this ethic, derived from Bentham and Mill, the goal of which might reductively be described simply as happiness. In his book, Russell notably endorses premarital sex or “trial marriage” between young men and women (of the same class, he cautions) to put an end to women’s utter sexual ignorance and to steer young men away from prostitutes: “Sexual relations should be a mutual delight, entered into solely from the spontaneous impulse of both parties. Where this is not the case, everything that is valuable is absent” (152–53, emphasis mine). Among those values are equality, shared physical pleasure, and the ability to ask for and receive what’s needed in a relationship. Indeed, Russell advocates marriage only if children are a consideration. Otherwise, he trusts adults to know their own hearts and minds and to seek happiness where they find it.
Russell claimed in his autobiography that the 1950 Nobel Prize was awarded him for this very work; certainly that prestigious award re-introduced the book into the midcentury cultural conversation (Autobiography 521). Russell had never been far from the minds of Americans, given his tours of U.S. colleges, lectures at Harvard, and his notorious un-hiring in 1940 by the College of the City of New York due to parents’ moral objections. As a man with three ex-wives by 1952, Russell—like Roger Thornhill—had amply demonstrated his belief in marriage by his frequent participation in it. Russell’s moral fitness was constantly questioned during his American sojourns, and yet his Marriage and Morals paved the way for the groundbreaking investigations into American relationships by Masters and Johnson and Betty Friedan that would challenge fifties conformity. He was a philosopher whom many disagreed with, but everybody read. Russell’s work was omnipresent in 1958 as context for the motifs of North by Northwest, with its complex relations between men and women.
If happiness is the goal of Russell’s philosophy of marriage, in his view love American style is not the ticket. Modern marriage, defined by American popular culture and psychology as a love-based, female homemaker–male breadwinner household was, rather, a ticket to disaster. Russell contends that unrealistic American romantic ideals about marriage led to serial divorce and widespread unhappiness, a perspective that is reflected in the world of the film. Neither Thornhill nor Kendall has achieved that putative ideal: he is twice divorced, and she introduces herself as “twenty-six and unmarried. Now you know everything.” These interesting, autonomous, complex adults are the kinds Hitchcock audiences came to see and perhaps emulate. While North by Northwest can be viewed as a hero’s journey away from mother and toward adult relationships, with Eve as the grail cup, this view minimizes the principals’ agency within the context of midcentury re-negotiations of gender roles, relationships, and what twenty-first-century wags have termed “the work-life balance.” A generation ago, Stanley Cavell identified the comedy of remarriage, and placed North by Northwest in that generic category. I would argue that the remarriage plot is one of repairing the partners, as we see in screwball comedies, rather than remaking the terms of marriage itself, as we see here. Russell frets about divorce as a cause of unhappiness, especially in America, but he and many Americans used it as a means to companionate happiness—a greater good being practicably served.
Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz notes that in the postwar period, American public intellectuals condoned divorce as a social corrective: “The influential sociologists Ernest Burgess and Harvey Locke wrote matter-of-factly that ‘the companionate family relies upon divorce as a means of rectifying a mistake in mate selection;’ ” indeed, they viewed “divorce as a safety valve for the ‘companionate’ marriage” (Coontz Marriage 233). Film historian Virginia Wright Wexman notes that the postwar changes in gender dynamics and work hierarchies began to redefine gender roles in cinema around the same time: “By 1950 52 percent of women worked outside the home, part of a large-scale trend that was to continue as the century progressed. As a result, [onscreen] relations between the sexes became newly charged with issues of competition and dominance” (Wexman 168). Wexman cites On the Waterfront (1954), with Eva Marie Saint’s good-girl Edie Doyle, as a film that portrays the ambivalence of gender roles in a changing midcentury world. Four years later, Saint’s Eve Kendall would eschew the midcentury marriage model for much more interesting work outside the home.
Conformist domesticity of midcentury Middle America, stridently promoted in women’s magazines, radio soap operas, and television, is wholly absent from the world of North by Northwest. It is replaced by a stylish world of sophistication, Cold War tensions, and independent moral agents. There is little place for cozy homemaker-breadwinner couples in the film’s main locations: the U.N., mansions on Long Island and Mount Rushmore, posh hotels in New York and Chicago, the elegant Twentieth Century Limited, and the high-end Michigan Avenue auction house. Even the hospital and National Park Service cafeteria in Rapid City, South Dakota, seem inhospitable to couples. The female patient through—and from—whose room Thornhill escapes the hospital could well be one of Russell’s dreaming spinsters. The families at Mount Rushmore are mere wallpaper to the complicated gendered showdown meant to separate Thornhill and Kendall, Kendall and Vandamm, and Vandamm (James Mason) and Leonard (Martin Landau). Couples therapy can occur only at the point of a gun, as in the cafeteria, the house atop Mount Rushmore, or on the face of the monument itself.
Freudians savor Roger Thornhill’s apparent dependence on his mother at the beginning of the film and his suspension between secretary and mother, two surrogates for the wives he has lost (although not for the bartenders). In the Plaza drop-off scene, Thornhill and Maggie lean slightly toward each other as he ends his schedule review to exit the cab, barely hinting at but ultimately rejecting, of course, a kiss goodbye. What Thornhill needs is not wife, mother, or secretary, but an equal partner. Yet Thornhill is not infantilized; he is fully adult, masculine, and in control even when he has been kidnapped. While he does use his one phone call from the Glen Cove Police Station to call Mother (Jesse Royce Landis), she certainly offers no sympathy or succor. After the court-mandated visit to the Townsend home and the charade of social niceties punctuated by Mother’s dubious comments, she pointedly hints that he might want to grow up. As they leave the Townsend home amid Thornhill’s protestations of his innocence, Mother says with exasperation, “Oh, Roger, pay the two dollars!” The drunk driving fine, as it happens, was also the cost of a New York State marriage license in 1958.3
North by Northwest challenges contemporary mores with such style that audiences accept the moral ambiguity of the principals as a temporary means to an end, anticipating a greater good for Thornhill and Kendall—and the free world, to boot. Their style and worldliness raise them above the home(l)y conformity of postwar America. Roger O. Thornhill transcends the executive uniform of the gray flannel suit, just as Eve rejects the looming, but in 1958 yet-unnamed, feminine mystique: neither would be functional in those quotidian midcentury gender roles. Whether or not they realize it at first, each seeks a fully companionate partnership, even as they spar over their respective independences: “I may have plans of my own, you know. And you have problems,” says Eve to Roger in her Chicago hotel room. The ethic at play is that of one individual joined to another through choice rather than social convention or economic and familial pressure. As such, their relationship is not headed toward a fusty marriage as in Shadow of a Doubt or the stifling portraits of domestic life in The Man Who Knew Too Much and Rear Window. Russell would contend that Thornhill and Kendall’s arrangement serves the utilitarian goals of a democratic society. Eve and Roger can only be pacesetters in terms of both a reimagined marriage ethic and personal style.
Much has been made of Roger Thornhill’s bespoke Saville Row suits as an index of his status as urban sophisticate (Lehmann 470). Less attention has been given to Eve Kendall’s clothing as sign, yet the costumes of the two lovers provide clues to their respective relations to marriage. Despite his two ex-wives (and presumably, in 1958, two alimony obligations), Thornhill does not wear a threadbare suit or last year’s shoes. He makes no evident financial sacrifices for the vagaries of his love life. He has a pocketful of bills for tips to cabbies, messengers, valets, bribes to Mother and, presumably, two-dollar civil fees. He is sartorially perfect, and utterly independent. He cautions Eve that, “when I was a little boy, I wouldn’t even let my mother undress me.” Being “a big boy now,” as she remarks approvingly, changes nothing (Lehman 119).
Married women—or women posing as married—dress in deep chocolate browns or muddy blacks. Vandamm’s sister, posing as Mrs. Townsend (Josephine Hutchinson), wears a New Look–influenced black dinner dress with a peplum on the night of Thornhill’s abduction and a brown sprigged day dress during the Glen Cove police visit the following morning. The dowager Mrs. Thornhill (Jesse Royce Landis) wears a chocolate brown Chanel-style suit with a luxuriant silver fox collar and a mink caplet. Both women wear pearls and have matronly auburn rinses on their “set” hair.4 Their colors are drab and muddy, an indication of the miasmic state of marriage, even in the best of families.
By contrast, Eve’s tailored black suit, wristwatch, and simple emerald pendant indicate a professional woman, dressed against type for a “Mata Hari” figure (Gilbert 10). Her hair is light blonde and simply styled, as befits a young woman of the world and a Hitchcock heroine. If we believe Eve’s characterization of herself as, “twenty-six and unmarried” and an “industrial designer,” she has had at least some engineering training. Her dark suit reflects that professionalism, whether it be industrial or international designs. Yet her suit blouse has a low boatneck rather than a conservative button collar or a severe bow, and her black handbag reminds us of Lisa Fremont’s suggestive Mark Cross overnight bag in Rear Window. The moral index here is degrees of independence rather than degrees of sin, as Stephanie Coontz’s research supports: “In movies as well, the images of acceptable female behavior narrowed, especially when it came to portraying women and work. Friedan’s claim that during the 1940s and 1950s the career woman … increasingly stood for “ambition” rather than “adultery” (Strange 67). Eve Kendall is dressed for success in the man’s world of espionage, rather than the midcentury marriage mart. As such, she is a free agent, governed by an ethic that is not yet readily apparent to Thornhill or the audience.
Ever the detail man, Hitchcock coded Eve’s clothing to the stages of this moral journey. Meticulously chosen at Bergdorf’s, Eve’s clothes do indeed play against the emotions of the scenes in which she wears them, as Hitchcock had intended (McGilligan 567). When she runs hot, the clothes are severe; when she runs cold, they are colorful. However, and more important, Eve’s clothes track her journey from New York to Chicago to South Dakota and from double agent to conflicted lover to soon-to-be-married woman. A New Look–style, full-skirted dinner dress in red and black replaces the business suit for the auction scene. As the red tones enter her wardrobe, so Eve’s attachment to Roger becomes evident. The navy and mouse-gray day dress and hat that Eve wears at the Mount Rushmore cafeteria suggest an ingénue, a dependent role that the scene-within-the-scene is meant to reinforce with Vandamm. Still, her accessories hint at the changing circumstances: Eve wears a pearl choker and carries a brown handbag. Her traveling ensemble for the flight from South Dakota is a light cinnamon brown, with fawn accessories: she is heading toward a marriage commitment, though not that of the chocolate-clad matrons and not to the man she is about to join on the polar route to Moscow. Eve’s costumes also make her visible against her various backdrops, marking her as utterly apart from domestic conformity.
Thornhill and Kendall meet in the train corridor of the Twentieth Century Limited while it is still in Grand Central Station. While we later learn that Kendall is on board to keep an eye on Thornhill, initially her response to his explanation of presence (“seven parking tickets”) is a simple amused “Oh.” It is worth noting that Ernest Lehman’s shooting script denotes the space of their meeting as an “aisle.” Hitchcock shoots the sequence like a wedding procession, with long shots down the aisle and reverse shots to show progress toward union. Thornhill enters the far end of the car in a limited vanishing-point long shot and moves center frame toward the camera. As he spots the police outside on the platform, frame right, he reverses course and heads back up the aisle toward the exit. The cut is to Kendall—at this point identified in the shooting script only as “GIRL”—in a medium shot, entering the car from the other end. She then moves toward the camera in a limited vanishing-point long shot that corresponds to Thornhill’s. She advances up the aisle, small, measured, and feminine as a bride (although in black), until a reaction shot to Thornhill interrupts her progress. Despite being lit for day and timed for the bustle of train departure, this progress toward the camera recalls the slow, dreamy approach in Vertigo of Judy-remade-as-Madeleine toward the waiting, gray-suited Scotty. In Vertigo, this approach is Scotty’s constructed fantasy of union; replayed in North by Northwest, it is a neutral meeting of—at this point—disaffected equals.
Figure 13.1. Eve (Eve Marie Saint) walking down the train “aisle.”
The exchange that this aisle leads to is not of vows. As the GIRL advances, Thornhill moves into frame left, and they perform a kind of pas de deux, neither giving way and neither leading. Lehman’s shooting script describes their motions: “She steps to one side. But he steps to the same side. He moves to the other side—just as she does … They move to the center—but in unison. Again an impasse” (66). Their movements in concert anticipate the makeout scene in Kendall’s train compartment, but the parallel movement and impasse in the aisle also suggest that they meet as equal agents. Thornhill doesn’t appeal to Eve for help, nor does he kidnap her as a decoy. After a brief dinner interrupted by an unscheduled stop, they simply lie to and then with each other—a thoroughly modern encounter.
Russell’s marriage ethic calls for a sexual morality predicated on measured self-control. Intentional action by independent agents is the goal of modern love. A morality based on fear of sin, of shame, of public condemnation can, for Russell, lead only to “thwarting of instinct” and unhealthy, unhappy liaisons (307). Given the Twentieth Century setting for this second stage of the plot—as well as Hitchcock’s choice of final shot before the closing credits—Russell’s metaphor seems fully apt:
The use of self-control is like the use of the brakes on a train. It is useful when you find yourself going in the wrong direction, but merely harmful when the direction is right. No one would maintain that a train ought always to run with the brakes on, yet the habit of difficult self-control has a very similar injurious effect upon the energies available for useful activity. (Russell 308)
The “useful activity” at this juncture is Thornhill’s pursuit of George Kaplan, and Eve’s attempt to divert his energies from that quest. In the after-dinner train compartment scene, Eve and Roger negotiate the “unsteady” (“who isn’t?”) motion on the rails while exploring bodies and assessing characters. Their heavy petting is accompanied by witty, flirtatious talk characteristic of Hitchcock bedroom scenes. One needn’t be a scholar of Elizabethan poetry to understand the sexualized references to death and ecstasy:
EVE: How do I know you aren’t a murderer?
THORNHILL (to her neck): You don’t.
EVE: Maybe you’re planning to murder me, right here, tonight.
THORNHILL (working on her ear): Shall I?
EVE (whispers): Yes … please do. …
This time her hands do help him, and it is a long kiss indeed.
(Lehman 80–81)
Neither Thornhill nor Kendall hits the brakes very hard. Lest we miss the point, Hitchcock embeds a small sartorial joke in Eve’s above-the-waist accessories: as Thornhill and Kendall neck in her low-light drawing room, her emerald pendant flashes a “green light.” Later, when she tries to extricate herself from Thornhill in her hotel room in Chicago, her garnet choker and ring signal “red light” warnings. As Russell concludes, “Conventional morality has erred, not in demanding self-control, but in demanding it in the wrong place” (239).
The profile two-shots in the Twentieth Century drawing room indicate the separation between the two principals, despite their free agency and free love. Shot with Hitchcock’s signature spiraling movement that stands in for sex in Vertigo, here the couple rather than the camera revolves, due to the close quarters of the compartment. When they finally settle on the edge of the bed and Thornhill leans in angularly for the kiss, Kendall contracts her torso to curve away from him. The only points of contact are hands and lips, a distance reinforced by her final bit of premarital pillow talk: “… you’ll be sleeping on the floor” (Lehman 83). Those are the brakes of self-control. Unlike Marian Crane (Janet Leigh) in the following year’s Psycho, Eve Kendall does not loll about her in underwear, and is not so desperate to marry that she’ll “lick the stamps” on the alimony checks. Midcentury domesticity is decidedly not on Eve’s agenda, whether the man in her life is Vandamm or Thornhill. Indeed, when questioned by police the next morning about her dinner with the fugitive, Eve refers to him as “Thornycroft”—the antithesis of the rose-covered cottage of domestic bliss. Yet the two have found more unison than impasse in their encounter, and Eve’s note to Vandamm is, finally, not as sardonic as she would like. Hitchcock pulls up from practical eye-level to an existential high angle, as Eve acknowledges what has become for her a real dilemma: “What do I do with him in the morning?”
The Prairie Stop scene is notable for its dramatic editing and special effects, but in terms of the marriage plot it little serves the film narrative. After Thornhill’s agile escape from the fireball of crop duster and oil tanker, he flees back to the city in a narrow bed pickup stolen from a farmer. He needs the truck, but the humble refrigerator in the back creates the joke. When Thornhill returns to his natural urban environment, the pickup and the “lonely” refrigerator stick out like a sore thumb, parked on Michigan Avenue near the posh Ambassador East in Chicago (Lehman 100). The refrigerator and the homely farm folk who stop to see the conflagration visually associate rurality with domesticity. These grangers look offscreen left as Thornhill backs out of frame right to steal the truck. They form a four-part tableau in profile, anticipating Thornhill’s ultimate destination in the hunt for George Kaplan: Mount Rushmore.
The harrowing rural experience, capped by a homespun image of domesticity, leads directly to a reunion with Eve in a room that visually suggests a path to marriage. While George Kaplan’s room 743 in the Plaza contained two single beds (he does have dandruff and a misshapen suit, after all), Eve’s room 463 in the Ambassador East prominently displays an extra-large “matrimonial” bed as backdrop to Thornhill and Kendall’s first reunion. The Asian décor also features two hybrid male-female Kannon figures on the credenza, poised between a rather nuptial arrangement of white carnations and gladiolus, and a television with remote control carefully positioned for watching in bed. This is not a spinster’s room by any stretch of the imagination, even before we see the fully stocked bar and the commodious marble bathroom off the bedroom.
When Roger appears at her hotel room, Eve runs across to embrace him. We are meant to see the revelation of her attachment to him in her relief at his survival. Roger stands rigidly disengaged from her. While they stand erect, body to body, there is no sense of union or shared space. His sense of betrayal is palpable, and plural: sexual, physical, and emotional. He is unwilling to bend, blaming Eve for the elaborate wild goose chase for Kaplan and his own near-immolation. When he decides to change tactics, his posture loosens just as hers stiffens in the wake of the phone call from her “clients.” Russell termed unmarried sexually active adults “emancipated” and “incontinent,” evoking their uncontained natures more than their propensity for accidents. Thornhill and Kendall in this scene exhibit incontinent behavior, indeed. He attempts to re-seduce her, and she makes a point of shrugging off their intimate encounter: “We’re not going to get involved. Last night was last night and that’s all there was, that’s all there is, there isn’t going to be anything more between us. So please—goodbye, good luck, no conversation. Just leave” (Lehman 119). Her casual dismissal of the night of passion on the train is dismissed equally casually by Thornhill with “unh-uh.” They both change tactics, she agreeing to dinner and he to freshening up. Fair is fair, as he says. The sexualized banter, spoken in front of the broad expanse of the bed, has a slight edge this time: “what could a man do with his clothes off for 20 minutes?” This line is nearly menacing in Roger’s insistence on keeping Eve in the room. Yet Eve’s take-charge—and decidedly not maternal—attitude toward Roger’s undressing leads him to ask, coldly, “How does a girl like you become a girl like you?” Her flirtatious response elicits a barrage of condemnations that are in no way seductive: naughty, wicked, up to no good, tease. Sexual openness is not the problem, but lack of fair play among consenting adults is. That bed will remain made. Thornhill opts for the ruse of the cold shower while Kendall makes her escape to Vandamm, carefully tucking the auction house address in her evening bag alongside the usual feminine miscellanea: lipstick, compact, .25 automatic pistol. Kendall and Thornhill each relies on deception to evade the pull of the other, serving their own agendas after being mistaken in each other. Such is the case with emancipated adults in this Hitchcockian world: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Russell’s philosophy.
The auction scene again places the couple in a setting imbued with domesticity—or its trappings, at any rate. Thornhill follows Kendall to Shaw and Oppenheim Galleries on Michigan Avenue, where an auction of high-end home furnishings is in progress. Purportedly “from the collection of Dr. Orlando Mendoza,” the various lots suggest little that is Hispanic until Lot 105, the Pre-Columbian figure from Colima. When Thornhill enters the room to discover Kendall literally under the thumb of Vandamm, the melodrama plays out against the visual and aural backdrop of the auction. As the auctioneer announces a “magnificent pair of Louis XVI fauteuils,” we see Vandamm’s hand stroking Kendall’s neck in an over-the-elbow medium closeup. In an unbroken pullaway and traveling pan shot, the camera moves toward Thornhill as he stands in the entrance to the auction hall, getting his bearings. He spots the spy tableau and crosses to them. As he approaches them, Thornhill compares Vandamm, Kendall, and Leonard to “a picture only Charles Addams could draw”—a domestic corruption altogether. Meanwhile, the auction proceeds. Each fine art piece in the catalog bears some metonymic relation to Eve, and thus fuels Roger’s fury at finding her in the company of the man who has now twice tried to kill him. Her New Look–style petticoated dress is as “upholstered in pure silk damask” as the fauteuils and the “lovely Aubusson settee” that follows them onto the block. Lest we miss the association, as the Colima figure comes up and Vandamm directs Leonard to bid, Thornhill remarks, “(looking down at Eve) ‘I’ll bet you paid plenty for this little piece of—sculpture—’ ” (Lehman 115). Thornhill’s sarcasm vents his anger at Eve’s perfidy, but also betrays his nascent jealousy. Russell cautions:
Among modern emancipated people the serious sense with which we are concerned is suffering a new danger. When people no longer feel any moral barrier against sexual intercourse, … they get into the habit of dissociating sex from serious emotion and feelings of affection; they may even come to associate it with feelings of hatred. (127)
The ethical position here is that sex without love is hateful, as Thornhill pointedly reminds the Professor once he is made to understand Kendall’s double-agency. Eve and Roger will resolve these issues at Mount Rushmore, but not before revelations about Eve’s mission realign their relationship as a high-stakes moral venture wholly apart from personal considerations.
The film’s third act shifts the moral tenor from domestic relations to domestic security. This plot shift also diverts focus from the principals’ distance from midcentury marriage mores. Their hitherto “emancipated” lives recede in the face(s) of national need. Eve says that the Professor’s approach was “the first time anyone ever asked me to do anything worthwhile;” the same applies to Roger once he knows what is at stake (Lehman 142). Stephanie Coontz reports that contemporary resistance to the midcentury marriage ethic could be viewed as seditious in “the rigid Cold War atmosphere that associated questioning marriage or gender roles with support for communism” (Marriage 235). Kendall and Thornhill’s elaborate performance for Vandamm’s benefit leaves no doubt with the audience about their civic sentiments.
At Mount Rushmore, the philosophy of marriage temporarily defers to the philosophy of patriotism for both plot and ethical reasons. With the dead presidents as a backdrop, Kendall and Thornhill must set aside their personal agendas and work together for national security. Marriage models have no place in this scenario—there are no first ladies on a wall near Mount Rushmore. The site is dedicated to the ideals of the founding fathers for, as Russell sagely notes, modern men “wish to achieve greatness rather through their position in the State than through possession of a numerous progeny” (32). The spy plot plays out under the noses of historic leaders to emphasize the higher ethic. Once the nation is secured, the individual can sort out his and her relationship woes.
As noted, the cafeteria at Mount Rushmore is full of family groups and pairs of men and pairs of women: surprisingly few male-female couples populate the concession. This is fitting, given the shift from affairs of the heart to affairs of state. When Vandamm, Kendall, and Leonard enter the dining room, Thornhill pointedly refuses even to speak with Eve in the vicinity, raising the tension and the stakes for Vandamm and distilling the dramatic moment of this play-within-a-play. The medium-long establishing shot cuts to a medium two-shot of Thornhill and Vandamm after Eve stalks offscreen, offended by Thornhill’s contempt. A quick cut to Leonard and back to Thornhill and Vandamm reminds us that this is a discussion among men. There is no place for gender equality in Vandamm’s world: men are the deciders. This is just another indication of his corrupt evil, within the world of the film. With the goal of convincing Vandamm of his animus, Thornhill offers his deal: in exchange for not telling what he knows, he gets “the girl” to deliver to the police. Even when she returns to the scene, the geometry of the shot triangulates the major characters so that Eve is not coupled in frame with either man until the shooting is imminent. As Thornhill pulls her away from Vandamm out of frame left, Leonard holds Vandamm in place. The couples are defined by the level of risk they will embrace. The cut is to a leftward tracking pan of Thornhill leading Eve as she fumbles in her bag for her pistol. They move together, even more in unison than in the train aisle because they now share a higher purpose.
The staged shooting that concludes this play for Vandamm’s benefit allows the personal and political to coalesce, clearly settling for the audience the question of the principals’ loyalty. Freedom in adult relationships does not entail a sacrifice of principles in the world of the film, and the union of Kendall and Thornhill ultimately serves the greater good because they two alone can stop Vandamm and make the country free for democracy. Russell would view this kind of teamwork as the optimal relationship. Leonard and Vandamm skulk offscreen right, leaving Eve to her own devices and revealing their view of her as disposable—a view that is anathema to the film’s moral and marriage philosophy.
The scene in the woods near Mount Rushmore places the couple alone, under watch of the monument, discussing their hurt feelings and disrupted relationship as a casualty of (Cold) War. Such bower scenes are a staple of the genre and lay the foundation for the spectacle of union that concludes the marriage plot: if they live, the plot is comic; if they die, like Romeo and Juliet, it is not. Here the dialogue is devoid of the flirty double entendres of the scenes on the Twentieth Century and in the Ambassador East, as both Eve and Roger know that their time is limited. Finally they are able to have a frank conversation about their circumstances. After Eve explains her past as a result of involvement with men like him “who don’t believe in marriage,” Roger can say, tenderly, “I may go back to hating you again. It was more fun” (Lehman 143). Thornhill can make such a quip now, because the danger that Russell predicted—paradoxically emancipated hurt feelings—has passed. The jealousy that colored the auction scene is dissolved, as is the question of divided loyalty.
The teamwork required of Roger and Eve in their escape from Vandamm reflects the détente they have reached in the cross-country process of sorting out their relationship. Despite her continuing with the charade of departure right up to the door of the plane, at the sound of gunshots Eve will snatch the “pumpkin” and flee with Roger, taking the microfilm-filled figure on their race across the faces of America. Their combined efforts allow each to be redeemed from their moral ambiguities in the process. As they begin moving across the heads of the monument, Eve falls into the gothic role of imperiled heroine, hampered by her shawl, then her jacket, shoes, and handbag. As they move closer to absolute interdependency, the feminine aspects of her costume fall away so that Roger and Eve can function as equals in the escape from Vandamm’s henchmen. Lehman’s shooting script refers to this shedding as a “striptease” (176), although its purpose is neither titillating nor provocative: Eve loses the encumbrances of her role as double agent, just as Roger was relieved of his gray flannel suit in the Rapid City hospital. Free of the respective personae they brought to the world of the film, the couple can now define themselves together as freedom fighters or outraged citizens or equal partners. Coontz traced public sentiment in the 1950s, finding that “[t]hroughout the decade, calls for partnership and mutuality in marriage alternated with public handwringing about whether people were taking these ideas to extremes … even ‘near equality’ must not be allowed to get out of hand” (Marriage 239). Partnership is the only defense against “the Vandamms of the world” (Lehman 144), but Roger and Eve have things well in hand, as the final sequence of the film reveals.
The flight across Mount Rushmore takes the pair across Jefferson’s forehead, and down between the first and third presidents, charting a journey between Washingtonian federalism and Jeffersonian democracy writ large. As they clamber, slide, and slip between the American colossi, Roger and Eve negotiate a union of free agents that carries them from Washington’s notion of “temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies” (Farewell par. 41) to Jeffersonian principles of the collective good, “where every man … would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern” (Inaugural). As they cling by their fingers to the tiered side of the blasted rock, national and domestic concerns become aspects of same ethic. Here Thornhill and Kendall are alone together as they were in the forest scene, and able to discuss their situation with an honesty born of their state of suspension:
THORNHILL: If we get out of this alive, let’s go back to New York on a train together. All right?
EVE: Is that a proposition?
THORNHILL: It’s a proposal, sweetie.
EVE: What happened to the first two marriages?
THORNHILL: My wives divorced me.
EVE: Why?
THORNHILL: I think they said I lived too dull a life.5
With the principals suspended between life and death, Hitchcock resorts to the marriage plot to resolve their situation. When Thornhill pleads with Leonard to help them up the cliff face, Leonard’s response is to crush Thornhill’s uphill hand, symbolically grinding the fingers under the sole of (Communist) oppression. This impasse can end only in violence, as the threat must be dispatched and the spectacle of union preserved. Vandamm loses both partners, Leonard and Eve, with one shot from a Park Service sniper. His corrupt model of emancipation cannot prevail once he plots to resolve his sexual jealousy “from a great height … over water” (Lehman 157).
Rather than ending with a saccharine taffeta wedding, Hitchcock opts for a match cut that sums up the relationship without exposition. As Thornhill struggles to pull Kendall to safety up the Mount Rushmore cliff, an extreme closeup of Thornhill against the deep blue South Dakota night sky unobtrusively becomes an extreme closeup of Thornhill against the blue Twentieth Century train compartment ceiling. He finally hoists “Mrs. Thornhill” to safety in the upper berth, thus satisfying the comic and dramatic plots in one short phrase. As they speed back to New York from the social and cultural parochialism of Middle America, Eve has traded her name and her costume for a new iteration of companionate marriage. She hops into the upper berth, no longer dressed in either spy-girl jewel tones nor matronly mud colors. Hitchcock being Hitchcock, of course, reserves the last uxorious joke for himself. The train racing into the tunnel in the final shot ends the thriller with a knowing wink about the couple’s legitimated sexual relationship. Hitchcock’s philosophy of marriage, like Bertrand Russell’s, espouses a union of equals serving the greater good of domestic security won through trouble and strife. And the wife, in this brave new world, is wearing pants.
Figure 13.2. Thornhill (Cary Grant) and the new Mrs. Thornhill in their berth.
1. Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (New York: Liveright, 1929; rev. ed, 1970), 76. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text of the essay.
2. Thomas Leitch argues that these films are linked by their exploration of “personal disintegration” (189) in the stories of Scottie, Thornhill, and Norman Bates. They also, of course, form a triptych of portraits of untenable marriages.
3. The New York Times of July 5, 1958, reports: “The $2 window at local race tracks caters to the more conservative gamblers in town. The stakes are somewhat higher at another $2 window, on the second floor of the Municipal Building, where hopeful couples are licensed to play a realistic version of You Bet Your Life” (emphasis mine). Note the sardonic tone worthy of Roger Thornhill. My thanks to Mary Feeney, University of Arizona Libraries, and the New York Public Library reference staff for confirming this amount.
4. Thomas M. Leitch associates “red, rust, and earth tones” (208) with mothers and mother-functions in the women surrounding Thornhill. He sees the film as a “comedy of homelessness” rather than a discourse on marriage, although Thornhill’s journey home and his path to companionate marriage are ultimately the same. Eve, despite her name and womblike compartment on the train, shows no interest whatsoever in mothering Roger. Her industrial designs are not domestic.
5. This dialogue is transcribed from the film, as it varies from the Lehman shooting script.
Cavell, Stanley. “North by Northwest.” Critical Inquiry 7.4 (Summer 1981): 761–76.
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin, 2005.
———. A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Gilbert, Nora. “ ‘She Makes Love for the Papers’: Love, Sex, and Exploration in Hitchcock’s Mata Hari Films.” Film & History 41.2 (Fall 2011): 6–18.
Jefferson, Thomas. “First Inaugural Address.” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson 33.17 (February to 30 April 1801). Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006: 148–52.
Lehman, Ernest. Shooting Script for North by Northwest. 1958.
Lehmann, Ulrich. “Language of the PurSuit: Cary Grant’s Clothes in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest.’ ” Fashion Theory 4.4 (2000): 467–86.
Leitch, Thomas M. Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.
McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Millington, Richard H. “Hitchcock and American Character: the Comedy of Self-Construction in North by Northwest.” Hitchcock’s America. Ed., Jonathan Freeman and Richard Millington. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Russell, Bertrand. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. 3 vols.
———. Marriage and Morals. New York: Liveright, 1929; rev. ed., 1970.
Washington, George. “Farewell Address.” September 17, 1796. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Washingtons_Farewell_Address.htm
Wexman, Virginia Wright. Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993.