North by Northwest

1
North by Northwest

• By Alfred Hitchcock
• Starring
• Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint

2
North by Northwest (1959)

• A suspenseful, classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller
• The film paired Cary Grant and Hitchcock for the
  fourth and last time.
• Eva Marie Saint appears as the blonde heroine.

3
Themes of North by Northwest

• Mistaken identity
• Wrong Man hero
• False pretenses
• Survival in 20th century America during the Cold
  War
• The Leo G. Carroll character in the film the
  head of the American Intelligence Agency, was
  possibly modeled after two 1950s real life
  figures Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
  and his brother Allen W. Dulles, head of the CIA.

4
North by Northwest

• Includes a tongue-in-cheek odyssey away from the
  city for a man who is normally sheltered by his
  wealth and prestige.
• A light-hearted and complacent hero/bystander ( a
  successful Manhattan advertising executive) is
  suddenly totally vulnerable, isolated, and caught
  up in an unexplainable series of events after
  being victimized (mistaken for an undercover
  Federal agent by a group of foreign spies), and
  then on-the-run as an implicated murder suspect
  (after being framed for an UN officials murder.
• He is pursued cross-country by a seeming
  conspiratorial group of spies, the police, then
  the FBI.

5
North by Northwest

• The American (Cary Grant) is forced to assume
  another mans identity (George Kaplan, a
  non-existent US agent) while confronted with
  murder, mayhem, a world of spies and
  counterspies, a domineering and unbelieving
  mother, and an untrustworthy, mysterious blonde
  lover.
• His final salvation occurs on the Presidential
  faces carved on Mt. Rushmore the most modern
  American image of all.

6
Setting

• Although much of the film was made in the studio,
  Hitchcock chose three prominent locales for brief
  segments of the photogenic film.
• The United Nations Building (NYC) (a hidden
  camera filmed the heros entrance up the steps
  into the building, but the UN lobby was a
  recreation.
• Grand Central Station (NYC)
• Mount Rushmore (in South Dakota) (there are shots
  of the exterior of the parks monument, but the
  actors crawled next to a reproduction of the
  Presidential faces.

7
Exciting Scenes

• These include a cross-country train ride
• The seven minute bi-plane crop duster attack
  scene near a Midwest cornfield
• The auction scene
• The dangling finale at Mount Rushmore