The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alfred Hitchcock · a film · 1959 · about 136 minutes · original screenplay by Ernest Lehman
Mode
Comedy thriller of the wrong man; chase, spy story and romance carried along one route
Mythos
The name that belongs to no one, lived into; a death staged and a rising; the son beneath the carved fathers; the passage from mother to wife
Phase
Twelve sequences along a route east to west and north, from a raised hand in the Oak Bar to a train entering a tunnel
Presentation
Feature film in Technicolor and VistaVision, about 136 minutes, for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; an original screenplay by Ernest Lehman, Saul Bass’s titles, Bernard Herrmann’s score
Register
From a mother’s laughter in a hotel lift to a plane turning toward a man on an empty plain; wit, glamour, farce and suspense held in one key
Scale
One man without an inside; a nation crossed from Madison Avenue to South Dakota
Governing Proposition
An advertising man raises his hand in a hotel bar and is taken for George Kaplan, a man who does not exist, and is pursued by spies and by the police from New York across the country to the stone faces of Mount Rushmore. The wager of the film is that a man with nothing at his centre can be turned into a fiction by a gesture, and that a chase played for wit and glamour can carry, without pressing it, the knowledge that the state will spend a person to keep its fictions alive.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a grid. Saul Bass’s titles run over the lines of a glass office tower while Bernard Herrmann’s overture, a driving fandango, pushes them on, and the grid gives way to Madison Avenue. At the end of the titles a bus door shuts in Hitchcock’s face. Roger O. Thornhill, played by Cary Grant, is an advertising man, and he names his trade himself: “expedient exaggeration”. His monogram is ROT, and the O, he says, stands for “Nothing”. Before anything has happened to him the film has introduced a man made of surfaces, with an empty letter at his centre.
At the Plaza Hotel, in the Oak Bar, he raises a hand to call a bellboy, and the gesture puts him in the place of a man named George Kaplan. He is abducted as Kaplan. At the Townsend house on Long Island he is questioned as Kaplan, and when he says he is not, he is forced to drink bourbon and put at the wheel of a car. The drunk drive that follows is played as slapstick, against rear projection. The danger is real and the treatment is comic, and the film will keep that pairing to the end.
Hitchcock directed and produced the film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and it was released in 1959, in Technicolor and VistaVision, at about 136 minutes. The screenplay, by Ernest Lehman, is original, not an adaptation. Robert Burks photographed it, George Tomasini edited it, Herrmann wrote the score and Robert Boyle designed it. Eva Marie Saint plays Eve Kendall, James Mason plays Phillip Vandamm, Jessie Royce Landis plays Thornhill’s mother, Leo G. Carroll plays the Professor and Martin Landau plays Leonard. Everything that follows comes from the raised hand: a gesture to a bellboy has made a man into a fiction.
Movement II
He goes to the police, and to his mother, and then with her to Kaplan’s room at the Plaza. It is empty, kept as if lived in, and the suit hanging there does not fit him. In the lift going down, among men who mean to kill him, his mother laughs at the killers. A man is trying on a man who does not exist, and the clothes are the wrong size.
At the United Nations he seeks out Townsend, whose house he was taken to, and a knife kills Townsend. Thornhill runs. The camera watches from high on the Secretariat, looking straight down the slab of the building at a tiny figure running from it. It is the first of the film’s heights, and it is made of scale alone: a man reduced to a dot against a wall of glass and stone, running from a killing he did not do.
In Washington the film shows what he is running inside. In the offices of an intelligence agency the Professor and his colleagues discuss him. George Kaplan is their decoy, and he does not exist: they invented him, and they keep him alive with a hotel room and a suit. Thornhill’s trouble is useful to them, and they will let him be killed rather than spoil it. The state appears as an “alphabet soup” of agencies, and its business is spending persons to keep its fictions in being. The man of nothing has been taken for a man who is nothing, and the fiction is more durable than he is.
Movement III
At Grand Central he gets onto the train for Chicago, and on the train he meets Eve Kendall. The woman is named Eve and meets him on a train. In the dining car she draws him into a seduction that is all talk and timing, and Tomasini cuts it as exactly as any action in the film. Lehman has already planted the matchbook with the monogram, ROT; it will come back later carrying a warning. The romance is charm, played at the pitch of comedy, and it carries him west.
From Chicago he is sent out to a crossroads on the prairie. A man stands alone on a flat, empty plain at noon. The road runs straight to the horizon. Cars pass, and the film holds the silence through them. A man waiting at the roadside remarks on a plane that is dusting crops where there are no crops. Then the plane turns toward Thornhill. Every convention of the thriller, the dark street, the shadow, the corner, is turned inside out: here the danger is daylight and empty space, and there is nowhere to hide because there is nothing there.
The widescreen frame is required by this sequence, whose meaning is the empty horizontal field, and the cutting makes it: long durations of nothing, then rapid action. Herrmann’s score knows when to stop. The sequence is the summit of the film, a sublime of exposure, and it became one of the most imitated and quoted in the cinema. It also states the film’s condition in one image: a man who has been stripped of office, mother and name is set down in the one place where there is nothing around him either, and the plane comes for Kaplan.
Movement IV
In Chicago he finds Eve again, and at an auction of art Vandamm bids for a pre-Columbian figure. The figure is the plot’s object: microfilm is hidden in it, and the film makes no secret that the object hardly matters. Thornhill is in the room, and gets out of it again. The auction could be shortened without loss of anything the film needs; it is one of the places where the chase runs past what it argues.
At the airport the Professor tells him the truth about Eve. She is the agency’s, placed in Vandamm’s bed by her own government. The explanation is drowned by the engines of the planes, so that the facts arrive as noise. What does not drown is Thornhill’s anger, the one moment in the film when he is openly angry, and it is not at the men who have tried to kill him but at the state’s use of her. The comedy stops here for a minute, and the disclosure is plain.
Then he agrees to go on as Kaplan. Under the agency’s direction he becomes the man it invented, wearing the name as he wore the suit, and the man with nothing at his centre is filled, for the length of the operation, by a fiction. The film has seen what it has disclosed and does not press it. It turns west again, toward a mountain carved with the faces of the nation’s founders, where the borrowed name will have to die.
Movement V
In the cafeteria at Mount Rushmore the death is staged. Eve fires a gun at him, and the gun holds blanks; he falls, and rises from a hospital bed. The death and rising are built into the plot, and the film keeps them in a wink. His escape from the hospital is played as near-pure farce, the one place where the film’s law bends toward another genre. He reaches Vandamm’s cantilevered house, and there the matchbook with the monogram carries his warning to Eve, and Leonard shows that the gun she fired held blanks.
The descent of the monument follows. Boyle built the faces as sets, and rear projection shows at the edges, but the sequence gives grandeur and vertigo together: the stone faces above, the drop below, the son over the abyss beneath the carved fathers. Leonard comes at them on the cliff, and the danger is real enough to kill. A hand slips on the stone, and a hand holds a hand. The national myth is used as a set, more than questioned, and the set holds the eye.
Then one splice makes the film’s argument. From the hand on the cliff the film cuts to a hand on a berth, and Thornhill pulls “Mrs. Thornhill” up onto the upper berth of a train. The man who began answering to his mother ends with a wife; peril and marriage are the same gesture. The train enters a tunnel, the law’s own wink. What others took from the film is wide: the James Bond films are commonly traced to it, Charade (1963) followed with Grant again, the crop duster is quoted everywhere, and Bass’s titles helped make the title sequence a form. Among its director’s films on this desk, Vertigo stands at 9.0, Psycho at 8.7 and Rear Window at 8.4, Notorious at 7.7 and Shadow of a Doubt at 7.6. Vertigo and Psycho stand above it on disclosure, depth and swerve: this film perfected its maker’s form, where they opened it or broke from it.
Act III · The Twelve
The chain of cause is tight. A hand raised at the Oak Bar to call a bellboy puts Thornhill in Kaplan’s place, and every later episode follows from that gesture and from his own attempts to clear his name. Lehman pays what he plants: the matchbook with the monogram, the gun fired in the cafeteria, the binoculars, the pre-Columbian figure. But the form is a picaresque of set pieces, and the give the subtractive test finds weighs. The auction, the hospital escape and the second half of the Professor’s exposition could be shortened without losing a fact the film needs; the plot’s object, microfilm in a statue, is avowedly arbitrary; and the length is permitted by the chase more than compelled by the argument. What holds the axis up is that each episode tightens the question of identity rather than repeating it.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure is real and stated in the film’s fabric. A Madison Avenue man, whose trade he calls “expedient exaggeration” and whose middle initial stands for “Nothing”, is taken for a man who does not exist: a fiction the state invented and keeps alive with a hotel room and a suit that does not fit. The fiction outlasts the man, since the agency will let Thornhill be killed rather than spoil it, and Eve, placed in Vandamm’s bed by her government, shows the same thing harder. Cold War power is an “alphabet soup” of agencies that spend persons as currency, and identity a surface that can be borrowed. What holds the axis is the register: the comedy keeps the disclosure light, it is seen rather than pressed, and a marriage resolves what the airport scene opened.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation comes in three places, each in its own key. The overhead shot from the Secretariat, a tiny figure running from the slab, is dread made of scale. The crop duster is the summit: a man alone on a flat plain at noon, the road straight to the horizon, the silence held through cars that pass, then the plane turning toward him, a sublime of exposure that inverts the dark street of the thriller. Mount Rushmore gives grandeur and vertigo together, the stone faces above, the drop below, a hand holding a hand. Herrmann’s overture, a driving fandango, lends the titles lift. Between these the register is wit and glamour, elegant rather than elevated; the summits are thrill more than transport, and the train romance is charm.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Two patterns are built and bear the plot’s weight. A man with nothing at his centre is given a name that belongs to no one and must live into it: he sleeps in Kaplan’s room, wears Kaplan’s suit and becomes, under the agency’s direction, the man it invented. And the passage from mother to wife is structural, from a man who answers to his mother to “Mrs. Thornhill” pulled up onto the upper berth. Much of the rest is evoked. He dies by a gun loaded with blanks and rises from a hospital bed; the son hangs over the abyss beneath the carved fathers; the woman who meets him on a train is named Eve. The film keeps all of it in a wink, and the national myth at Rushmore is used as a set more than questioned.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The film inherits a path its maker proved: the innocent man on the run across a country, pursued by police and spies at once, from The 39 Steps (1935) and Saboteur (1942), which ended on the Statue of Liberty as this ends on Rushmore. It perfects that form at the scale of a studio colour spectacle rather than turning from it. Its turns are local and real: the crop duster moves menace out of shadow into open daylight and empty space; the spy plot’s object is treated as meaningless, very nearly said aloud; and light comedy is pitched near farce inside the thriller, a mother laughing at killers in a lift. The stake, an expensive original screenplay with no source, was placed on a proven path, and that holds the axis lowest of the eleven.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The form knows what the content says. A man kept in constant motion has no self but the one imposed on him: the route, from the crowded Oak Bar to the empty prairie to the edge of a monument, is the instrument that strips Thornhill of office, mother, name and alibi, and the widescreen frame is required by the crop duster, whose meaning is the empty horizontal field. The mixed tone is not decoration: it says that the state’s game is a farce played with real knives. The coda’s cut, from a hand on the cliff to a hand on the berth, makes the argument in one splice. What holds the axis is the route’s looseness: many of its episodes are interchangeable within it, and there the form is a container rather than an instrument.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are six decades of it. The film has been re-examined seriously throughout that span; psychoanalytic, political and identity readings recur, and the crop duster is still used to teach cutting. Return pays in the making: the plants, the rhythm of the prairie and the splice at the close reward a second viewing and a tenth. What holds the axis is convergence. The readings agree more than they multiply, and once the empty-centre joke, the mother and the satire of the Cold War state have been seen, return yields new pleasures of making more than new meanings.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Released in 1959, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a consolidation: the wrong-man thriller made into a modern, portable form, the glamorous chase across landmarks built as a chain of set pieces, with a spy plot whose object does not matter, light comedy, a sexual double agent and a hero in a suit. It is a summation more than an invention, and the summation weighs: much of what others took from it is a form the film perfected rather than one it found, though its reach on popular film is among the widest of its decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the James Bond films from 1962 onward, commonly traced to it; Charade (1963), with Grant again, and a long line of glamour thrillers; the crop duster, among the most imitated and quoted sequences in cinema; and Saul Bass’s kinetic titles, which helped make the title sequence a form of its own.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across sixty-seven years. The form survives whole in its VistaVision negative; restorations are repair, and nothing of the original is lost. Presence has been continuous and wide, on television, in repertory, on every home format, in teaching and in quotation, and the crop duster and Rushmore are images known to people who have not seen the film. The surface fixed to its moment is real: the Cold War spy plot, the Madison Avenue man and the rear projection belong to 1959, and the rear projection shows its age plainly. But the film has outlived those conditions and is watched as it was made, not as a period piece. On this evidence the process work alone would hold it only a step below the widest survival, which is still more than the medium allows. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium is high in every department, and the making bears weight. Lehman’s screenplay carries its exposition on wit and pays its plants. Tomasini’s cutting of the crop duster, long durations of nothing and then rapid action, is a lesson in rhythm, and the dining-car seduction is cut as exactly. Burks’s VistaVision gives the open frame its depth; Herrmann’s score knows when to stop; Boyle built the Vandamm house and the monument as sets that hold the eye; Grant’s comic panic is a precise instrument. The costs run through the film and weigh against all of this: rear projection in the drunk drive and at the monument, studio sky, and the Professor’s exposition scenes, flat in their staging.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs the whole: a man of surfaces in a world of surfaces, where danger is real enough to kill, Townsend at the United Nations, Leonard at the cliff, and is always met with wit. Take the most distant elements, the mother’s laughter in the hotel lift and the hand slipping on the stone, or the drunk drive played as slapstick and the silent menace of the prairie: they obey the same physics, in which terror and comedy are both performances watched by someone. The range runs from farce through romance to suspense and spectacle, and Grant holds it in one key. The law bends at the hospital escape, played as near-pure farce, and the bend is felt; the tunnel at the close is the law’s own wink rather than a breach of it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Several orders are held along one route across the country: the family, in a mother, two former wives and a marriage at the end; the state, as intelligence agencies, the United Nations, police and courts; history and the nation, at the monument and in the pre-Columbian art; the natural order, as prairie, forest and mountain; labour, as advertising and a redcap’s uniform; and one consciousness, Thornhill’s, rendered from outside in comic reaction. They are joined by the route, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is depth: each order is surface, work is mostly absent, the sacred appears only as the civic sacred of the carved faces, used as scenery, and the film’s own theme is that its hero has no inside.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Made at 8.6, then The Inner Law at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2. Sixty-seven years of continuous presence, with images known to people who have not seen the film; a making in which script, cutting, photography and score bear weight; one law of surfaces under which terror and comedy are both performances; and a reach on popular film, through the Bond films, the glamour thriller and the quoted crop duster, among the widest of its decade.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the family, the state, the nation, the natural order and labour are joined along one route, but each as surface, the sacred only as civic scenery, and the hero has no inside. Above it, The Swerve at 7.6, a perfection of its maker’s own proven form with turns that are local; then The Unconcealment at 7.7, a disclosure about the state and the borrowed self that the comic register keeps light and a marriage resolves; and The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, held by a picaresque whose auction, hospital and exposition run long and by patterns built in two places and evoked in the rest.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.1, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Unconcealment at 7.7 and The Swerve at 7.6 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. The work is held below the summit by four axes against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.0 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of North by Northwest as released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1959, about 136 minutes, in Technicolor and VistaVision, from Saul Bass’s titles to the train entering the tunnel: directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock from an original screenplay by Ernest Lehman, photographed by Robert Burks, edited by George Tomasini, with music by Bernard Herrmann and production design by Robert Boyle. One version is in circulation and it is the object; later restorations of the VistaVision negative repair it and bear on its survival only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only in fragments whose words are certain; the line about crops where there are none is described rather than quoted, and which garment of Kaplan’s suit fails to fit is not stated. Figures and facts that could not be verified, among them the day of first release, the budget, the length of the crop-duster sequence, the share of dialogue, the shot and scene counts, the name of the prairie crossroads, which scenes were made in the studio rather than on location and why, and awards and poll ranks, are not given.