Classics at The Alameda: North by Northwest

Cary Grant is my all-time favorite movie star. It's always great fun to see him in North by Northwest as the ultimate falsely-accused man-on-the-run - although Hitchcock made something of a specialty of this type of film, of course, including another one of my favorites, The 39 Steps. I'm pleased to say that the projection was pretty good today at the Alameda; rarely soft and pretty well-framed. Prior to the show, I asked the fellow at the snack bar whether the staff had pre-screened the print with an eye to ensuring good focus; turns out they did, until 5 AM this morning.

In addition to the feature presentation, the Alameda also screened a few charming shorts prior to the main show: Tex Avery's 1951 Symphony in Slang, a very short promo about a boy who sees Santa Claus in everyone and the classic John Waters "No Smoking" announcement. The latter was especially nice to see as it reminded me of my frequent trips to the old UC Theater in Berkeley when I first moved to California ten years ago. That sadly defunct repertory grindhouse played nightly double-features of classics, foreign films and cult favorites - and always opened the show with the sardonic Waters' bit:


Today, watching North by Northwest, I was struck by a couple of things. First - something I also noticed again last week during the Vertigo screening - Bernard Herrmann, the great film composer, frequently recycled bits and pieces of his scores, or at least that's how it seems to me. I first noticed this when writing a major essay on the use of sound in Citizen Kane in film school. Being a great fan of that film and also Vertigo, I noticed that some of the music in the first film seems to have been used for the second. This is not precisely the case; it's more a matter of very similar-sounding chord progressions sneaking into different compositions - and the very same progression I noticed in those films is present in North by Northwest, too!

If you're curious, listen to the music Herrmann uses in the Thatcher Library scene in Kane, just as the reporter, Mr. Thompson, begins to read Thatcher's journal, before the film dissolves into the depiction of the snowy day when Thatcher arrived to take young Kane away from his parents - and a certain favorite sled. Compare this music to the theme in Vertigo, repeated throughout the film, that can be heard as "Madeleine" stares at Carlotta's portrait in the Palace of the Legion of Honor. I could swear that I also heard the first few notes of this same theme at one point in North by Northwest, I believe when Cary Grant returnes to Eva Marie Saint's hotel room after his encounter with the malevolent crop duster.

The second thing that struck me today was how vividly the film illustrates Hitchcock's notions of the establishment and utility of suspense versus surprise in visual storytelling. Hitchcock was the "Master of Suspense," but I suspect that this has come to mean, for some, simply that he made "scary movies," like Psycho. The trouble there is that it's too easy to see Psycho as the precedent for the slasher movies that came afterward which, to this day, tend to rely much more on surprise than on suspense, to their detriment. (If you take a look at the trailer for the pointless remake, or "reboot," of Friday the 13th, you'll see what I mean.) Here, Hitchcock explains the difference in conversation with Francois Truffaut:

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the audience knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!”

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed.

This is perhaps the key to Hitchcock's art; throughout North by Northwest, in big and small ways, we see examples of this in which we are shown something that is not immediately revealed to our hero. For instance, we learn long before Cary Grant that there is no George Kaplan; we are shown Eve's gun in her purse, though Grant doesn't know about it; Hitchcock pulls out to show us the henchman waiting on the other side of the rock as Grant and Saint flee across Mt. Rushmore. This approach is a big part of what keeps the film working, in all of its splendid preposterousness.