C’mon now, you didn’t really think I was going to go and see this over the weekend did you? Not a shock I’m sure to anyone who visits the Guardian film pages to see this fifty year old Hitchcock release given the Minty treatment, they’ve been giving it quite a few column inches over the past week or so. I have to confess (ha, do you see – ‘I Confess‘) that this is actually the first Hitchcock film I’ve seen at the cinema which is criminal. Many years ago I did turn up at the Curzon Soho on a Sunday lunchtime, eager to pop my Hitchcock cherry with a double bill of ‘Vertigo‘ and ‘The Birds‘ and I’d only gone and got the bloody dates wrong. Never mind, it was worth the wait as ‘Northwest’ is one of my favourite films by the master of suspense and it was quite a treat in the ideal environs of the well air-conditioned NFT1. I did have a quick look at this beforehand which was underwhelming to say the least, at a tenner a go I should really have killed time before the screening with another wander around Tate Modern down the road.. C’est la vie… 

The legendary Saul Bass at work there of course, Fincher paid tribute of sorts with the titles to ‘Panic Room‘. ‘Northwest’ might be a film about a suit, a sartorial wonder that our hero Cary Grant, the true personification of the word debonair, propels through a simmering world of hidden danger, macabre murder and deviant deception. Laconic Ad-man Roger Thornhill is mistakenly identified as the secret agent George Kaplan during a telegram mix-up in a New York restaurant, after being kidnapped by foreign agents the bewildered Thornhill is enveloped in a cat and mouse game with the nefarious Vandamm (James Mason, never better) and his henchman Leonard (Martin Landau) who frame Thornhill for the murder of a dignitary at the United Nations building. Seeking to clear his name Thornhill falls in with the archetypal Hitchcock icy blonde, the crystalline Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) and a burgeoning romance develops as the government agents and foreign devils struggle to smuggle the all important McGuffin microfiche out of the country….

   

It’s Hitchcock at the peak of his powers, coming off the previous years critically mauled ‘Vertigo‘ he purposely embarked on a more commercial thriller project which was then followed up with the grandfather of all those nasty little slashers ‘Psycho‘ the following year – not a bad run eh? All the usual suspects are here, cameraman Robert Burks, editor George Tomasini, composer Bernard Herrmann and screenwriter Ernest Lehman all contribute to forge one of Hitch’s most celebrated and loved golden age movies. Philip French recently alluded to a curious new theory doing the rounds about these three films forming a loose trilogy where one of the central protagonists is a ghost, a cipher, an invisible presence who may or may not exist – Madeleine in ‘Vertigo’, Kaplan in ‘Northwest’, Norma Bates in ‘Psycho’ but a cursory goggle hasn’t thrown up much, I’m sure there would be all sorts of allusions to psychoanalytic theory and the absence of an Oedipal or Elektra figure, the missing figure being the surrogate id or agent of the superego, all that sort of stuff which I enjoy reading if I’m in the right mood. Critics love to allude to the whirlpool of psychosis that structure our societies and how many of Hitchcock’s films puncture that veneer of normality to let the agents of chaos and murder run free, not dissimilar to much of Lynch’s work now that I think of it. It’s a testament to Hitchcock’s skills that he was able to embed such subtexts into the DNA of many of his films that academics are still coaxing out connections, links and refractions between his work some fifty, sixty years later. For me the star of the show was some of the examples of ‘pure’ cinema which I explore a little below, the gripping Herrmann score and the coolly chilling performance of James Mason, an actor who frequently nudges his way into my favourite actors of all time list, just take a look at ‘Odd Man Out‘, Nicholas Ray’s satirical ‘Bigger Than Life‘, ‘The Wicked Lady‘ and of course ‘Lolita‘ which neatly leads me to link to some recently excavated Kubrick material here.

Lets just take a quick look at this classic scene shall we? First of all, there is no score until the attack begins in earnest toward the end of the sequence, the first trick in Hitch’s arsenal to unsettle and unnerve the viewer. The opening establishing shot projects the dimensions of the action, the lack of cover for Thornhill to furtively scramble toward, an elevation of the importance of space from time in the sequence which is reinforced by each of the shots in the scene lasting roughly the same duration and the editing only accelerating in line with the action toward the scene’s finale. The ominous arrival of the older bus pedestrian raises suspense expectations – is this Kaplan? Is he armed? – which are dismissed through dialogue revelations then reaffirmed when he casually remarks ‘Funny, there’s no crops to be dusted there…..’

 

Truffaut called Hitch out on the scene and asked in a very respectful manner if the sequence wasn’t wholly gratuitous and absurd as it doesn’t in any sense move the plot forward, it doesn’t move the story along (actually it does as it demonstrates the apparent malevolence of Eve as she sent Thornhill to this place to meet the elusive Kaplan but that’s another story) to which Hitchcock customarily replied ‘I practice absurdity quite religiously’. He wanted to take the viewers down a different path, to give them another in the series of shots of adrenaline that peppered the film and climax with the celebrated Mount Rushmore (spoilers) finale. Moreover in usual maestro fashion Hitchcock had the idea to invert the idea of his hero being pursued by the usual trench-coated assassins, our hero in fear of his life, isolated in a pool of light on a shadow drenched city street, an ominous sleek limousine quietly prowling into shot in the distance, the usual cliché manner of presentation to build suspense and tension. Instead he decided to take our avatar into the bright sunlight, into blank open countryside where no hidden menace could lurk, a much more challenging puzzle for him to solve cinematically with theoretically a more profound effect on the audience – I’m also left wondering if it was the first example of a hero running away in mid-shot with an explosion erupting behind him. I like and appreciate the sequence like any film-fan but my favourite arrangement in the movie is the auction room scene, the construction is exquisite.

  

Curiously I’ve been thinking about Hitchcock recently in a slightly more tangential way due to one my film pod-casts broadcasting an article where they selected a list of the all time best cinema books that any cineaste should have read and own. This list had made an astoundingly glaring omission by not including this (incredible audio here), not only the seminal work on Hitchcock (although the Spoto is also good) but a project that set the template for the comprehensive interview format book with filmmakers which focused on the conceptions, ideas and ideologies behind the movies and how those themes were wielded with the artistic film-art choices (composition, camera movement, editing, the whole mise-en-scene elements, the employment of certain film stocks) rather than just some of the on-set anecdotal production stuff which of course can also be hugely entertaining. So for the record here is a selection of the best film books I’ve read, from the business and global financial elements through to overviews of specific eras and movements, proceeding on to specific directors and actors, closing on the homogeneous craft of film, there is certainly a wealth of material out there.