Well, here I am in the final 20 entries, and it looks like Alfred Hitchcock is pretty well represented from here. I had a really nice Hitchcock set, but I loaned it to my niece when I thought she was looking to be a film buff herself, but that never happened and she still has ’em. Hitchcock’s presence on streaming services is a bit sporadic, believe it or not, so I might need to do some digital rentals for the four Hitchcock films in the top twenty on the Stacker list. But then I lucked out (maybe) when I found three of the four pop up on AMC+, a service I do have. It might be a Halloween thing, so I may not get to them before they disappear. But North by Northwest was not among the batch. But then I realized it was in a second, different Hitchcock collection I never loaned to my niece that included that gem of a film. So, I actually did have it.
The last time I covered North by Northwest, I largely focused on how Hitchcock used lead actor Cary Grant in ways he couldn’t use frequent lead Jimmy Stewart. This time, I want to look at how the action movie might have evolved as seen with this film.
First off, I have gone out of my way in this series to refer to whatever I am discussing for each of these columns as “films” and not “movies.” There’s a simple reason for that: “films” connotes a more artistic endeavor than “movies” does, and in my mind, there’s a difference. And yet, somehow, I can’t refer to the action movie genre as action films. To be clear, the best action movies do often have cinematic qualities to them that would make them “films” in my mind, but I can’t seem to think of the genre as a whole that way. Now, I’m not a snob. I don’t mind seeing a movie or film as just some light entertainment for two hours or so. But the basic point is this: all films may be movies, but I would hesitate to call all movies films.
For the record, North by Northwest is most assuredly a film.
However, is it an action movie? I would argue, but the standards of 1959, yes. The action movie probably became what it is in the 1980s, the sort of movie starring a slab of human muscle with lots of shooting, explosions, excessive deaths, topless women here and there, and a final showdown where the protagonist dishes out the most elaborate death scene for the movie’s villain. I grew up on those things, and I still love ’em when they’re done right. But those movies didn’t automatically start off that way, and outside of a war movie, action sequences in older films are often nowhere near as elaborate as the ones I grew up on.
That gets me back to North by Northwest, the prototypical Hitchcock film where the director many called “the Master of Suspense” did his standard plot where an ordinary man, in this case advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), is mistaken for a government operative by two henchmen to known bad guy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason). Taken away and accused of all kinds of things that Thornhill has no clue about, he’s set up to die in a fake drunk driving accident but manages to survive through what I identified in my original write-up of this film from 2018 as “dumb luck.”
It likewise occurs to me here in 2023 that in a more recent film, there’s a good chance that Thornhill would have really turned out to be the secret agent after trying to make the audience think otherwise.
OK, there’s the set-up, and much of what follows is as much about spycraft as it is anything else. Does the film have action sequences? Well, yes. Obviously there’s the most famous sequence in the film where Grant runs from a cropduster in the middle of a field that seems intent to do him in. There’s then Thornhill’s attempts to stay alive after he’d been drugged and set off down a cliff in car he can barely control, the Mount Rushmore sequence where Thornhill and the beautiful agent Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) dodge baddies while climbing around giant presidential faces, and even Thornhill’s escape from a hospital. Guns go off in his presence, and despite the fact Thornhill has no special skills that can keep him alive in these scenarios, to say nothing of the fact that Cary Grant was in his mid-fifties at the time of filming, he somehow keeps coming out on top.
So, there are some action sequences, and the film’s final one does end with a major villain losing his balance and falling from Mouth Rushmore to his death. Oddly enough, it isn’t Mason’s Vandamm. No, he’s taken alive, perhaps because he’s James Mason and a rather charming rogue at that. Likewise, between the action sequences there are a lot of suspenseful scenes that require more intelligence than physical prowess to escape. And that’s not when Grant isn’t trying to (successfully) seduce Saint despite a 20 year age difference. In many ways, as much as I can see North by Northwest as an action movie, it’s also a fairly standard spy film that doesn’t feature an actual spy as its lead character.
Then again, Hitchcock always preferred the ordinary man in over his head. This would have been a very different film with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role.
However, I am a bit hard-pressed to name an action action movie from this period. To be clear, there are a lot of Westerns, sci-fi films, and the like that could be considered “action movies” in that they have a lot of action and excitement. But even the more exciting films of that genre save the action sequences for moments between character and plot development. Contrast that with, say, the excellent John Wick franchise where an action sequence seems to break out every five minutes, and it’s hard to see what an action movie from 1959 would even constitute if not something like North by Northwest. Yes, there are many scenes where I am fairly certain that Hitchcock was filming his actors standing in front of a moving backdrop while they pretend to walk or drive, but it’s still a world where a cropduster might try to kill you if someone thinks you’re a secret agent that doesn’t exist. The idea of the ex-commando who continues to use his (rarely her) skills to protect loved ones because some idiot from his (rarely her) past decided to try something, well, that trope maybe hadn’t been invented yet. Or if it had, it wasn’t in the same class of film as what Alfred Hitchcock was up to. I suppose there must have been a lot of cheap B-movies that didn’t care much about the health and safety of their cast and stunt performers, but I can’t claim to have seen any.
So yeah, I’d say North by Northwest qualifies as an action movie.
NEXT: From one master director to another, be back soon for one of Stanley Kubrick’s best with 1964’s Dr. Strangelove.
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