Movie Details
| Title: | North by Northwest | |
| Director: | Alfred Hitchcock | |
| Year: | 1959 | |
| Genre: | Thriller | |
| Times Seen: | 2 | |
| Last Seen: | 07.25.24 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (7)
- Family Plot
- The Man Who Knew Too Much
- Marnie
- Notorious
- Spellbound
- Topaz
- The Wrong Man
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 07.25.24 | airplane | After Repo Man I chose this to watch to finish out my flight. It was somewhat compromised by low volume and no subtitles so some of the dialogue was lost on me but I'm familiar enough with the film that I didn't mind almost not hearing it. Truth be told I'm surprised to see that this title is already on the site. Looks like I watched it back in 2008 when I bought a DVD box set or something. I didn't go into too much detail though so I'll talk more about it this time. These days when I tell people that I'm into movies it often causes a moment of self-reflection. While I suppose it's true that I am still "into movies," my level of consumption is nowhere near what it was earlier in my life. This journal existed to see the height of my hobby (which would be 2006, 2007) and since then it's been a steady decline to now when I sometimes go months without watching anything. So you can go on Letterboxd and see a ton of accounts that watch way more movies than I do... people that still regularly go to the theater to see whatever's new, actively look at the Paramount's summer series calendar or Alamo's Weird Wednesdays or Terror Thursdays/Tuesdays/whenever it is (if those series even continue). Old friends like Jarrette and Chris and Daniel and even Grant put my current habits to shame. Yet, I do still have a wall full of DVDs and Blu-rays in my home office and I do still keep this journal going (which predates letterboxd) and my memory is still full of great films which I love. My current retirement fantasy is to devote days of time to watching all kinds of movies... revisiting old favorites, exploring directors' ouevres, going down internet-fueled rabbit holes. My free time is just going towards other things at the moment. All that to say, I had a major Hitchcock phase in late high school / college. A friend of mine (Jim) wanted to be a filmmaker and would graft on things he loved and talk about them to everyone. I think, looking back, that his greatest gift was conveying enthusiasm for that which he loved. He turned many a friend on Jimi Hendrix via mixtapes from his extensive bootleg collection and I think he got his hands on Hitchcock/Truffaut before me and started talking about each Hitch movie that he saw. Thanks to my mom who had a habit of taping movies off cable (we had a massive collection of VHS tapes, each holding three movies, with numbered spines referenced in a stacked rolodex), I'd seen Psycho already and maybe The Birds because that was my mom's favorite. With an enthusiastic friend however, I started examining each week's TV Guide, looking at the movie listings in the back for anything directed by ol' Hitch. That book coupled with a programmable VCR meant I caught a shitload of his catalog thanks to TCM. So I think that's how I first saw this movie and both Jim and I loved it. I remember feeling that it was top-form Hitchcock with grand movements and action told with peak efficiency and aplomb. So that's kind of how it's stuck in my memory. If people come up to me today and ask me which Hitchcock movies they should watch North by Northwest is invariably in the top five (Rear Window being number one, Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, and Notorious rounding out the other 4). However i realize it's been quite a while since I've actually watched these movies, so seeing it on the plane's list made for an easy pick. I'm pretty surprised, I was not head over heels this time! Now, it's easy to list qualifiers. It was on a tiny back-of-seat screen with volume so low I could barely hear the dialogue, physical discomfort from sitting with my legs tied in a pretzel, etc. etc. but also the movie has some pretty weak moments. Like if James Mason is convinced Cary Grant is the guy he wants, why's he trying to kill him? or if he only wanted to kill him isn't there an easier way to do it than get him drunk and put him in a car? And how does James Mason have a whole gang of thugs if he's a covert spy? Not to mention Eva Marie Saint, who Cary Grant has no problem wanting to fuck at first glance but then gets to slut shame her for being willing to fuck him out of the blue for some ulterior motive. And the action itself is fairly ridiculous. The sets for the top of Mount Rushmore even though you can clearly see no trees on the top of that mountain much less a plateau of flat wooded ground followed by random shots of them rolling around on a set and cutting instantly to the end of the movie. It's all stuff I think I read about being genius in Hitchcock/Truffaut and took for granted as being great when I first saw it that falls apart with a modern look. And ultimately, I think what that's what I'm feeling: an even greater disconnect in time. I first watched this movie when it was ~40 years old and I watched it in the context of a bunch of other movies from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. And compared to those, Hitch's style DOES stand out. His views on montage and suspense have proven correct. However, now the movie is ~65 years old. It's harder to put myself back in a space where, forget CG, this movie was made before there was even an "action" genre! Decades before Stallone and Schwarzenegger, years before Bonnie and Clyde and The French Connection, a sequence like the crop duster was INTENSE! Sure, nowadays we have stuff like the extraction scenes from Extraction 1 and 2 but back then this was novel. Similar things can be said about women's lib and cold war politics and gun violence. So... I dunno. I shouldn't be surprised that a movie like this continues to age, but it was a little shocking to see the pedestal under Hitchcock crumble a bit in my eyes. That score though. And that silence leading up to the crop duster scene. And the speed with which Hitch gets a random dude into trouble. I think it's one of Pixar's rules of storytelling now but never more evident than in Hitchcock films: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. This describes at least half of Hitch's films, and North by Northwest is maybe tied with The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man as most exemplary. Anyway, I should note that I still liked the movie. At this point it feels like a nostalgia trip for me, but I think and would hope that it still holds first-time viewers' attentions. I was just surprised to find it short of perfection like I used to see it. |
| 09.12.08 | DVD | Wheeeeee! |
