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HITCHCOCK’S WOMEN: A Woman in Danger – Eve Kendall in NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) – PART II

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Rebecca McCallum concludes her analysis of North By Northwest, part of her Hitchcock’s Women series. Degrees of Deception Themes of reality and pretence pervade North by No…

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Conflict, control and coolness: Rebecca McCallum continues her regular series examining gender in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, focusing this month on his seminal spy thriller...
A secret agent, an accomplice to a gang of kidnappers, or a woman falling in love with an advertising executive? Throughout what is often referred to as the most Hitchcockian of all Hitchcock films, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) slips to and from these roles, creating a beguiling mystique.

In North by Northwest, Eva plays an undercover spy who is gathering information on criminal mastermind Van Damm (James Mason), a man she also happens to be in a fraught relationship with. When Van Damm's henchmen accidentally misidentify the unwitting Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) as George Kaplan - a man who is top of their hit list - he finds himself caught in a hot pursuit. On the first leg of his epic journey, Roger meets Eve who shows mercy by hiding him from the authorities in her cabin. However, she is also seen to be in cahoots with Van Damm, rendering her loyalties and true objectives (initially at least) as questionable.

Eve is a highly competent agent who is measured, meticulous and devoted to her work. However, what she does not count on is falling in love with Roger and his ability to reach beneath her detached persona. While it is ostensibly Roger who travels across state in almost every form of transport imaginable, it is Eve's journey that is the most tense and unforgettable as she finds herself endangered by the demands of men, eventually leading towards a conclusion where her life is under threat.

All About Eve

Following in the footsteps of many Hitchcock women (see Madeline Elsterand Lisa Fremont in Rear Window) Eve Kendall's arrival into North by Northwest is delayed and we do not meet her until the forty-five-minute mark. Unlike her counterparts however, there is no mention of her nor any teasing glimpse into how she is perceived by others.

Instead, ahead of her collision with Roger aboard the express passenger train, the director gives us no warning or clue as to what to expect and we are given the opportunity to form our own opinion of a complex woman as we begin to observe her many layers unfold. Upon first watch, the viewer could be forgiven for believing her initial encounter with Roger is a chance happening: however, as the many dimensions of Eve's character are revealed, it is clear that this is far from coincidental. Rather - like much of Eve's life - it is carefully crafted and planned.

Although much younger than Roger, Eve is cool, self-assured, and confident, always looking him directly in the eye, fixing her gaze upon him (a note that Hitchcock himself gave to Saint himself). In contrast to this Roger wears sunglasses, not only as a means of concealment but arguably also as a symbol of him being blinded, both by Eve's beauty and her false identity. Roger is a social creature, as the build up to their encounter shows - he liaises with colleagues, drinks with friends and spends a great deal of time with his mother. In short, he is surrounded by people: Eve on the other hand masks feelings of intense loneliness and isolation with her measured demeanour and ability to put work ahead of her personal life. Her occupation and lifestyle dictate a detached existence and a guardedness that prevent her from building meaningful relationships.

An Underestimated Power

Although she is often governed by men, Eve is very much a woman in control in her interactions with Roger, particularly in the early scenes of the film. In one of the most expertly crafted exchanges in the Hitchcock canon, Eve and Roger share a scene of scintillating dialogue in the dinner cart. During their conversation, Roger makes a remark that is loaded with irony: 'Oh you're that type? Honest.' Eve's reply of 'Not really' is an early indication of her duplicitousness that will only become apparent later, and indeed may be more of a guilty admission than a mere statement.

Sexually confident, when he is seated opposite her in the cart she looks at him longingly and declares 'It's going to be a long night and I don't particularly like the book I've started...if you know what I mean?'. It is evident that Eve enjoys thrills, adventure and is attracted to danger through her profession, but she is also underestimated by Roger in this respect. Roger believes that it is down to sheer luck that he happens to have been seated in such close proximity to her, however we discover it was Eve herself who engineered this by tipping the waiter five dollars. Furthermore, by conceding this fact to her new acquaintance she is demonstrating her power, subverting his expectations and watching how he reacts. Forthright and direct, she leads the conversation using seduction and sex appeal to achieve her goal of keeping him exactly where she wants him. As they share several romantic trysts in the privacy of her cabin she offers to find Kaplan for him, but he initially resists, claiming this is too dangerous for he: little does he know that she is far more capable than he assumes.

Eve's ability to maintain control can also be seen in the various directions and instructions she issues to Roger - from convincing him to allow her to contact Kaplan, to advising him to change his clothes in the bathroom at the station. One could argue she almost fulfils a mothering role now that his actual mother is removed from the film, something which could even be considered an unconscious attraction on Roger's part.

Despite her cold exterior Eve also has great moments of vulnerability, such as when she and Roger part at the station before his meeting with the assumed Kaplan. As she delivers the details of the planned rendezvous, even after only knowing Eve for a short time Roger can detect a change in her, observing that something is wrong: but before he discovers what that is, he darts off into the crowds of commuters and it is only when Eve is alone that we see the conflict etched on her face.

Dressing For Meaning

Every leading actress in Hitchcock's films has an accompanying wardrobe that is not only elegant and beautiful but offers a reflection of what is going on in their internal world, what's happening at any specific moment or how they are being perceived. Eve Kendall is no exception, her clothes an outward representation of her thoughts and feelings. Saint's entire wardrobe was picked out personally by Hitchcock due to him disapproving of the original costumes selected for her by MGM studios: as he sculpted Eva Marie's style - from the kitchen-sink actress that she was famed as into a Hitchcock woman - one wonders if the notion of him enacting the disturbing makeover scene from Vertigo ever came into his mind.

When Eve first graces the screen, she is dressed in a black skirt suit. Contoured to her body enough to suggest an erotic silhouette, this reflects her mysterious nature. Black also speaks to her occupation - being an agent, this colour is symbolic of slinking around quickly and delicately like a black cat. In the cabin scene she will remove her jacket to reveal a white blouse, the black and white of her outfit here not only recalling the colours of a chess board (and therefore the various moves and strategies that will be deployed throughout the film) but also the duality within her. In the white blouse, her face is framed like a diamond, echoing Lisa Fremont's first entrance in Rear Window - and like Lisa, Eve is romanticised in this moment as she and Roger embrace.

Perhaps Eve's most memorable outfit is the red dress which she is seen in at the Ambassador Hotel. A striking garment that is tight at the waist with a full skirt, the dress is adorned with luxurious red roses. But where there are roses there are thorns (and in this case, a Thornhill!) and the delicateness of the red flowers (a colour associated with danger) acts as a meditation on the polarity of Eve's character and how Roger views her in this scene. Red is also synonymous with love and passion, and thus reflects the intense romantic feelings circulating between the pair. Finally this dress, with its high neck and plunging back (see also Alicia Huberman in the party scene of for an earlier example), provides an echo of both Eve's vulnerability and exposure, as well as the constraint she is under: a theme supplemented by the choker she wears around her neck.

At the Mount Rushmore cafeteria Eve returns to her dark colour palette seen earlier in the film, wearing a grey ensemble: this is indicative of her feeling in control and being undercover. At Van Damm's house and on Mount Rushmore, Eve wears an orange suit - a reflection of and turn around from the colour palette she wears at the start of the film, signifying a change in her. The orange, like the red of the rose-covered dress, also links to danger, and therefore is in direct correlation with the threat to her life.

Rebecca McCallum
Rebecca will return soon with the concluding part of her analysis of Eve in North by Northwest.

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HITCHCOCK'S WOMEN: A Woman in Danger - Eve Kendall in NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) - PART I

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Conflict, control and coolness: Rebecca McCallum continues her regular series examining gender in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, focusing this month on his seminal spy thriller... A secret agent, an accomplice to a gang of kidnappers, or a woman falling in love with an advertising executive?

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How to Lose a Cold War (and Why) by Matthew Schmitz _ Articles _ First Things

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North by Northwest, one of Alfred Hitchcock 's most popular films, is an epic story of government intrigue and mistaken identity. The story begins with Roger Thornhill, a successful advertising agent in New York, dictating a letter to his secretary as they walk through his office building. Roger proceeds to The Plaza Hotel, where he has a business meeting. Once there he signals a pageboy, who is asking after "George Kaplan," and is mistaken for George Kaplan by two thugs standing nearby. Roger is immediately abducted by the two men who believe him to be Kaplan. They take him to a remote mansion on Long Island where he is questioned by a soft-spoken man claiming to be named Townsend. Despite Roger's denial and confusion, the man who calls himself Townsend is convinced that Roger is Kaplan and has his henchmen forcibly intoxicate him. Completely drunk, Roger is driven to the edge of a cliff by the men who try to stage a false suicide, but he manages to escape, taking control of the vehicle and eventually being taken in by the police, who arrest him for drunk driving.

When no one believes Roger's story, he embarks on a mission to discover the truth about George Kaplan, the man for whom he's been mistaken. He arrives at Kaplan's hotel room at The Plaza, but finds his room deserted. Two of the henchmen corner him in the hotel, but he manages to escape again, making his way to the United Nations, where Townsend supposedly works. Once there, he learns that the man he met at the mansion was not Townsend at all, but an imposter. The real Townsend is an employee of the United Nations, and the criminals are illicitly using his mansion as a base. When Roger shows Townsend a picture of the counterfeit Townsend, one of the thugs-a man named Valerian -throws a knife into Townsend's back. Roger pulls the knife from his back in the lobby of the United Nations, and instantly finds himself framed for murder.

Roger journeys to Chicago where he thinks Kaplan is staying, and aboard the train meets Eve Kendall, a beautiful industrial designer who befriends him and agrees to keep his secret. Roger and Eve soon fall in love with each other, but it is quickly revealed to the viewer that Eve actually works for the criminal organization that initially abducted Roger. Meanwhile, a meeting at an intelligence agency in Washington D.C. takes place, and we are introduced to the character of the Professor, an elderly man who is the head of the committee. In the course of the meeting, we learn that George Kaplan does not really exist: he is a decoy invented by the intelligence agency to distract the fake Townsend's criminal organization from discovering an actual double agent-employed by the intelligence agency-in its ranks.

Having received a false message from "Kaplan" through Eve, Roger journeys to a deserted farm town where he is nearly killed by an assassin in a stolen crop-duster airplane. Roger manages to escape as the crop-duster flies into an oil truck and explodes. Returning to the city, Roger confronts Eve, whom he now knows is not to be trusted. Roger follows Eve to an auction, where he learns of Eve's involvement with the false Townsend, whose name is really Vandamm. When Vandamm assures Roger that he will not leave the auction house alive, Roger creates a disruption so that the police will take him away. After being arrested, Roger is taken to the Professor, who convinces him to continue the deception that he is George Kaplan, so that they can maintain the safety of the government agent, who is revealed to be Eve Kendall.

Roger and the Professor follow Vandamm to North Dakota where Eve pretends to shoot Roger in the cafeteria of the visitor center at Mount Rushmore, in order to reassure Vandamm of her loyalty to him. After he is quietly taken to the hospital, having been shot with blanks, Roger learns that Eve is leaving with Vandamm for Europe that evening. After the Professor forbids him to become involved, Roger escapes from the hospital and makes his way to Vandamm's house near the top of Mount Rushmore. Outside the house, he overhears one of Vandamm's henchmen, Leonard, inform Vandamm of Eve's disloyalty, having discovered her blank-filled gun. Having learned this disturbing news, Vandamm plans to kill Eve as soon as they board the plane. Roger manages to warn Eve in time, and the two flee with a statue that Vandamm purchased at the auction, which Roger has learned is full of microfilm. Pursued by Vandamm and his men, Roger and Eve attempt to climb down Mount Rushmore. Just as Vandamm's men are about to kill them, the Professor arrives with the police. Vandamm is arrested, and Roger and Eve leave on a train together.

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North by Northwest , one of Alfred Hitchcock 's most popular films, is an epic story of government intrigue and mistaken identity. The story begins with Roger Thornhill, a successful advertising agent in New York, dictating a letter to his secretary as they walk through his office building.

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N orth by Northwest's style is so impeccable, its tone so effervescent, that many viewers fail to grasp the film's seriousness. Ernest Lehman, the screenwriter, did not help when he described the film as an insubstantial caper in the vein of James Bond, "something that has wit, sophistication, glamour, action and lots of changes of locale." One critic called the film an example of Alfred Hitchcock's "contentless virtuousity"-the work of a man who has nothing to say but says it very well. But North by Northwest would not be so appealing if it did not have serious things to say. On his wild ride by plane, train, and automobile from the curb of Madison Avenue to the peak of Mt. Rushmore, the film's hero travels as much distance morally as he does physically.

North by Northwest 's gloriously convoluted plot arose from the need to connect two geographically disparate scenarios that Hitchcock wanted to film: a chase across the faces on Mt. Rushmore, and a murder at the United Nations. In each of these set pieces, Hitchcock shows the desecration of a quasi-sacred civic site and skewers the nameless, faceless functionaries who at mid-century were coming to dominate postwar life.

The United Nations buildings were constructed in the hope that violence would one day be vanquished-not by the second coming of Christ, but by human cooperation. "These are the most important buildings in the world, for they are the center of man's hope for peace and a better life," said President Truman while laying the cornerstone. "There are no international problems which men of good will cannot solve or adjust." He described the erection of the buildings as an "act of faith."

When Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) goes to the U.N., he indeed finds people of all nationalities and creeds, chatting over cocktails in a sleek, modern lounge, in a vision of international cooperation. All is as Truman imagined-until a dagger plunges into a man's back. Peace and understanding give way to violence and blame. Naturally, Hitchcock was not permitted by the U.N. to film this sacrilege on location. (He stole a single shot of Grant in the U.N. plaza by hiding a VistaVision camera in a carpet-cleaning van.)

The film's celebrated climax atop Mt. Rushmore was even more scandalous. It was still common at the time of the film's release to refer to the monument as "the Shrine of Democracy." It stood, in Franklin Roosevelt's words, as "an inspiration for the continuance of the democratic-republican form of government, not only in our own beloved country, but, we hope, throughout the world."

Given the monument's significance, MGM assured park officials that no violence would take place on the faces of the presidents. Hitchcock had his own plans. When the Department of the Interior realized that he planned to film a chase across the monument, they revoked his permit. (He had to shoot his Mt. Rushmore footage with a studio mock-up.) Letters from concerned citizens to the National Park Service expressed outraged piety. "It would indeed be a sacrilege to have Cary Grant running up and down Lincoln's face." "Rushmore is a shrine to the American people and they don't want it defaced or debased by Alfred Hitchcock." "This is only one more step in our national disintegration, a loss of respect for things sacred to our history." Upon the film's release, Conrad Wirth, director of the Park Service, condemned it as "an act of deliberate desecration."

But Hitchcock was not so much evincing his own "loss of respect for things sacred to our history" as depicting the decline of that respect among America's elite. The film juxtaposes monuments to our dead patriots with elites of questionable ethics and loyalty. Atop Hitchcock's Mt. Rushmore is a modernist house, the lair of the urbane traitor Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), whose business is stealing state secrets-a concrete expression of the idea that the people at the top of our society cannot be trusted.

The point is driven home throughout the film. When we first see Grant in the role of advertising executive Thornhill, he is striding down Madison Avenue, giving commands to his secretary, dictating insincere love notes, telling a lie to steal a cab. He defends his lies as "expedient exaggeration"-stock in trade for an ad man. His tan bespeaks leisure, his immaculate gray suit taste. Attractive as he is, he worries that he may be gaining weight. His monogram is ROT, and when Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) later asks him what the "O" stands for-in a sense, what he stands for-he answers, "Nothing."

What is true of the man seems true of his country. America as Hitchcock shows it is glittering, prosperous, of uncertain morality. When Vandamm's criminal ring mistakes Thornhill for a government agent and tries to kill him, Thornhill receives no help from the authorities. The malevolence of the would-be assassins is less chilling than the indifference of the intelligence officials. "C'est la guerre," says one. "It's so horribly sad," says another. "How is it I feel like laughing?"

The conference room in which the officials meet is decorated with Old Glory, a framed Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and a portrait of the Washington family. Out the window one sees the Capitol dome. But the ideals evoked by these symbols have no bearing on the officials' calculations. Men who profess to believe that all men are created by God, endowed with certain unalienable rights, set aside those principles for the sake of expedience. Their leader, known as "the Professor" (Leo G. Carroll), congratulates the others on a "marvelous stroke of good fortune." Thornhill has diverted attention from their real agent, who is undercover inside the criminals' ring.

When North by Northwest debuted in 1959, the United States was in the midst of a postwar boom, the so-called "golden age of capitalism." Widespread prosperity funded gleaming skyscrapers and well-kept National Parks. The GI Bill had created an educated class that staffed growing public and private bureaucracies. The members of this "new class" were technocratic in outlook, cosmopolitan in taste, and increasingly powerful.

Anxieties about the growing power of this class were expressed and inflamed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. His movement sought to combat certain American elites as much as it did any foreign threat. As Michael Rogin, a political scientist at Berkeley, put it: "To [the McCarthyites] communism was not the whole story; their enemies were also the symbols of welfare capitalism and cosmopolitanism." Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, claimed that "the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal" that intends to "betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations."

Hitchcock's film toys with these anxieties. All three of the male leads are played by British actors: Grant, Mason, and Carroll. Their distinct speech marks them as upper-class, cosmopolitan, of suspect loyalty. Carroll's Professor is a creature of the academic-military-industrial complex, at home in an impenetrable bureaucracy. ("FBI, CIA, ONI," he says, "we're all in the same alphabet soup.")

Vandamm and the Professor have a pawn in common: Eve Kendall, a beautiful woman with whom Thornhill falls in love, and who happens to be the undercover agent in Vandamm's ring. The Professor prostitutes Eve to Vandamm, who schedules her execution once her cover is blown.

When Thornhill first meets Eve, he treats her as he would any other woman, enjoying what he thinks is a one-night fling. By the film's end, he objects to the way the government has deceived him, used her womanhood, and endangered her life. A louche dandy who trifles with girls has become a man ready to lay down his life for the woman he loves. He stands for right against those who stand-as he once did-for nothing. "War is hell," a government official replies. "Even when it's a cold one."

Moved by his love for a woman, inspired by her own brave example, Thornhill objects. "If you can't lick the Vandamms of this world without asking girls to bed down and fly away with them and probably never come back," he tells the Professor, "perhaps you should learn how to lose a few cold wars."

It is the most radical line in the film, an absolute rejection of the idea that the ends might justify the means. We believe it because Hitchcock has shown how Thornhill has been shaken out of his complacency. His gray suit, so pristine at first, has been wrinkled, caked with dust, and at last taken away. Near the film's turning point, we see the well-tailored Thornhill stripped of all finery save a medal and cross on a gold chain. Intentional or not, the symbol is fitting. The cross has always symbolized the cause of the weak against worldly powers.

In extracting Eve from the clutches of agents federal as well as foreign, Thornhill defies the nameless bureaucrats who purport to know best, the agents of what some now call the "deep state." As far as he can see, "our" elites are scarcely preferable to "theirs," no more chivalrous or moral, no more concerned with the fate of the common man. More important, he rejects the ethics of expedience. If winning a war requires disgracing one woman, or killing a single innocent, he would rather lose it.

It is hard to imagine a more countercultural stance. The America Hitchcock depicts had secured peace and prosperity by waging total war and demanding unconditional surrender. When we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, we showed ourselves willing to do anything expedient for victory. By effacing the distinction between civilian and combatant, warfare and massacre, we cut ourselves off from our highest ideals and committed a desecration far greater than filming a chase across Mt. Rushmore. Any film that points this out deserves to be taken seriously.

Matthew Schmitz is senior editor of First Things.

Photo by Insomnia Cured Here via Creative Commons.

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How to Lose a Cold War (and Why) | Matthew Schmitz

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N orth by Northwest's style is so impeccable, its tone so effervescent, that many viewers fail to grasp the film's seriousness. Ernest ­Lehman, the screenwriter, did not help when he described the film as an insubstantial caper in the vein of James Bond, "something that has wit, sophistication, glamour, action and lots of changes of locale."

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"I want to do a Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures," allegedly announced screenwriter Ernest Lehman, after his friend, composer Bernard Herrmann recommended him to Alfred Hitchcock. This inspired idea was born at the time when Lehman and the famed filmmaker were experiencing a sort of a writer's block-they were supposed to be making The Wreck of the Mary Deare for MGM, but when Lehman honestly stated he felt there was nothing he could do about advancing with the script, Hitchcock simply suggested they did something original. Directly out of this writer's block came North by Northwest, one of the most entertaining movies of the period and, perhaps, one of the most stylish chase thrillers of all time. That Lehman wasn't misguided when he announced his ambition mentioned at the start of this paragraph is clearly seen even upon a superficial glance on this project: we have an innocent man cornered into a grave, life-threatening situation thanks to the mistaken identity plot device, we have the typical Hitchcock blonde, played marvelously by Eva Marie Saint, we have the master's signature cameo appearance, and then there's the technical mastery distinctive for Hitchcock's works, as well as his consummate skill at manipulating the audience's emotions.

North by Northwest encompasses all the best elements of Hitchcock's opus, transforming an intriguing, nail-biting but surprisingly humorous script into quite possibly the most enjoyable Hitchcock ever. The film went through several title changes during development, being known as The Man in Lincoln's Nose, Breathless, In a Northwesterly Direction ... The final title was hardly Hitchcock and Lehman's first choice, but they simply failed to come up with an entry that satisfied them completely. The lead role, that of an advertising executive whose comfortable life is turned upside down when he is mistaken for a secret agent, went to the ever-charming Cary Grant, even though Hitchcock's old friend and collaborator James Stewart allegedly eagerly wanted the part. As huge Stewart fans, we believe he would have been great as the troubled, charismatic "ordinary man in an extraordinary situation," but who can possibly say Hitchcock dropped the ball with sticking with Grant? Even though MGM tried to force Cyd Charisse down Hitch's throat, and despite the fact he briefly mused over casting Grace Kelly or Elizabeth Taylor, he chose Saint for the lead female role.

Bernard Herrmann's contribution to the film was not restricted to the fateful recommendation that put Hitchcock in touch with Lehman: he composed a superb score that matches the adventures and turmoil featured on the screen perfectly. The acclaimed graphic designer Saul Bass provided an exceptional and highly memorable opening title sequence, Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief director of photography Robert Burke operated the camera, while George Tomasini, the first-rate editor who previously worked on The Birds, Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo, pieced everything together flawlessly. The way Hitchcock skillfully plays with the viewer's emotions has been aptly demonstrated in the famous crop duster scene, where Grant's character is hunted down by a menacing airplane in the middle of a field, in bright sunlight, with nowhere to hide. This might be rightfully considered the trademark image of North by Northwest, but one should not forget this film abounds in numerous other unforgettable scenes: just consider the Mount Rushmore sequence at the climax, or the humorous final shot of a train entering a tunnel as we presume the two lead characters within the train start getting all hot and sweaty. North by Northwest is painlessly easy to find pleasure in.

A monumentally important screenplay. Screenwriter must-read: Ernest Lehman's screenplay for North by Northwest [ PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.

ERNEST LEHMAN

Though Ernest Lehman is best known today for his work in films (he has won more Best Screenplay Awards from the Writer's Guild than anyone in the Guild's history), his collection, which consists of over 2500 items from his personal and professional files, covers an entire career that spans over forty years in New York and Hollywood, not only as a screenwriter but also as a novelist, short story writer, journalist, motion picture producer and director. Lehman met Hitchcock through their mutual friend, composer Bernard Herrmann. North by Northwest was Ernest Lehman's only original screenplay. Hitchcock had an idea of a chase across the face of Mount Rushmore. The idea of a man being mistaken for a nonexistent secret agent was suggested to Hitchcock by journalist Otis L. Guernsey Jr. That was the starting point for Lehman's screenplay: the chase on Mount Rushmore, mistaken identity, and the United Nations building. -The Ernest Lehman Collection; Ernest Lehman's notes

Here, he is interviewed by Tony Curtis in 1997.

How Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriter Ernest Lehman managed to take a vague mistaken-identity concept and a Hitchcockian set piece and turn it into the iconic adventure we have come to know. This video essay was written, edited, and narrated by Tyler Knudsen.

One temporary title for North by Northwest was Breathless!, which was later used for the famous 1960 French film. Courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

"One day, Hitch said to me, 'I've always wanted to do a scene in the middle of nowhere-where there's absolutely nothing. You're out in the open, and there's nothing all around you. The camera can turn around 360 degrees, and there's nothing there but this one man standing all alone-because the villains, who are out to kill him, have lured him out to this lonely spot.' Then Hitch continued, 'Suddenly, a tornado comes along and...' 'But Hitch,' I interrupted, 'how do the villains create a tornado?' and he had no idea. So I wondered, 'What if a plane comes out of the sky?' And he liked it immediately, and he said, 'Yes, it's a crop duster. We can plant some crops nearby.' So we planted a fake cornfield in Bakersfield and did the scene that way. And, like you said, it became a very famous sequence. As a matter of fact, that's how I knew that Cary Grant had died. Every channel on TV was showing that shot of Cary running away from the plane. It's strange, isn't it, that such a distinguished career should be remembered mostly for that one shot?" -An Interview with Ernest Lehman

The cinematographer's camera angles for the crop dusting sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest. All 61 bullet points represent a specific camera angle, a specific shot, as detailed below. The iconic sequence was a combination of location footage and studio-based rear projection. The book, Casting a Shadow: Creating the Alfred Hitchcock Film, by Will Schmenner and Corinne Granof is a Cinephile's delight, filled with all manner of delightful insider info to how Hitchcock actually made movies. Courtesy of The Big Picture.

As seen here, seamless rear projection was used to create the illusion of Cary Grant being pursued by a crop duster in North by Northwest. Courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

" North by Northwest's crop-duster scene-in which Cary Grant's victim of mistaken identity finds himself in a fallow Indiana field, hunted by a low-flying biplane-is one of the most iconically thrilling moments in Alfred Hitchcock's fiendishly clever body of work. But, according to Robert F. Boyle, who served as production designer on this as well as four other Hitchcock films, the genius of the sequence isn't in the pursuit itself-it's all in the buildup. In this new piece by Daniel Raim, who interviewed the late Boyle at his home in 1999, the Hollywood veteran points to the patient setup of Hitch's immortal flyby-with Grant nervously approaching a solitary man across a dusty highway, and a lonely bus trundling through on the road to nowhere-as a textbook example of the power of the 'penultimate moment,' or the anticipatory time before something happens. And teasing out a subterranean connection between two of the twentieth century's most influential artists, Boyle also finds such subtle hints of suspense throughout Edward Hopper's portraits of American city life. To cut to the chase, there's only one way to break the tension: check out the whole video above, then head over to the 10 Minutes or Less section on the Criterion Channel for Raim's piece, also featuring Boyle, about the backdrops in North by Northwest's cliff-hanging Mount Rushmore climax." -Hitchcock, Hopper, and the Penultimate Moment

In this 1965 interview, Hitchcock discusses-partly in French- La Mort aux Trousses (French title for North by Northwest), and in particular the famous "that's funny-he's dusting crops where there ain't no crops" scene.

Production designer Robert F. Boyle created these sketches of James Mason's modern hideout, the Vandamm house, which Cary Grant scales in North by Northwest. Courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

A huge presidential nose offers a sense of scale for the Mount Rushmore sets created for the climax of North by Northwest. Courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

This contact sheet shows the optical trickery used to show Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint descending Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest. Courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

English actor James Mason became one of Hitchcock's most memorable villains as Vandamm in North by Northwest. Courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

STORYBOARDS FOR 'NORTH BY NORTHWEST'

"Storyboarding is really an illustrator's work for the director. A motion picture illustrator puts pictures on paper and puts them on boards. In storyboarding a script for a Hitchcock film, the illustrator is told what pictures to put on the boards by the script, which has benefited from my conferences with the director. Of course, I participate in what is going to appear on that storyboard, because even without the storyboard the script describes exactly what is going to be on the screen. Hitch would have it no other way. The script even describes the size of the shot, whether it's a medium or a tight close-up, whether the camera pulls back and pans to the right as the character walks toward the door, whether it tilts slightly down and shoots through the open doorway getting the helicopter as the lights go on outside. That's why Hitch says it's a bore for him to get the picture on the screen, because it has all been done already in his office." -Dialogue on Film: Ernest Lehman

Storyboard sequence by Robert F. Boyle for the re-edited ending of North by Northwest.

THE MAKING OF 'NORTH BY NORTHWEST'

"Even though it was early October, the climate was like a sweltering desert. This was one of the only times Hitch wore short sleeves on the set. For three days, poor Cary ran with a stunt plane swooping down at him or so it would seem. As nobody would think of putting Cary Grant in the position of getting decapitated by a plane some trick photography was used. I feel like a traitor telling you this but first the crew shot a swooping plane from a ditch and then, later, Cary was shot on a sound stage jumping into a fake ditch with the plane footage on a process screen behind him." -Eva Marie Saint

HITCHCOCK'S CAMEO

During the opening title sequence, which shows New Yorkers rushing home from work, Hitchcock just misses catching his bus. The cameo was filmed near to 347 Madison Avenue, New York City. Courtesy of The Hitchcock Zone.

An excerpt from The Man on Lincoln's Nose, the Academy Award-nominated Documentary Short Subject about pioneer art director Robert F. Boyle ( North by Northwest, The Birds, Fiddler on the Roof). This 6-minute excerpt features Bob Boyle and director Norman Jewison on location scouting and the design process for Fiddler on the Roof.

THE MUSIC OF BERNARD HERRMANN

This kaleidoscopic compilation of soundtracks by Bernard Herrmann scored for film, television and radio presents a feature-length overview of this incredibly unique composer's wide-ranging and distinctive style. Working with directors such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, during a career that spanned over forty years, Herrmann created scores of such innovative and emotional magnitude that notions of sound and music in cinema have never been the same. The breadth and scope of Herrmann's ingenious composing, arranging and orchestrating talent is on full display here, from the use of the theremin in The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), to the all-string 'black & white' sound for Psycho (1960), and the whistled main title of The Twisted Nerve (1968). Stream the mix below or download it here. Total running time: 80 minutes. Courtesy of MUBI's on-going series, Notebook Soundtrack Mixes.

http://notebook-audio.s3.amazonaws.com/mixes/Notebook-Soundtrack-Mixes-4-Fragments-of-the-Mirror-the-Music-of-Bernard-Herrmann.mp3

CARY GRANT: A CLASS APART

Elegant. Witty. Stylish. A totally original talent. 'Everyone wants to be Cary Grant... even I want to be Cary Grant,' he was fond of saying. Born 100 years ago into dismal circumstances in Bristol, England, Archibald Leach got his start touring in vaudeville and eventually arrived in New York in 1920. He walked on stilts at Coney Island and sold neckties on midtown street corners before landing small parts, in route to Hollywood. He hit it big in 1933 as Mae West's leading man in She Done Him Wrong, followed by Sylvia Scarlett and the emergence of his classy on-screen persona-and the invention of that persona off-screen as well. He worked with such directors as George Cukor, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks in such films as Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, North by Northwest, Notorious, and I Was a Male War Bride and opposite every top Hollywood female star, including Grace Kelly, Katherine Hepburn, Kim Novak, Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn. He remains one of the most adored actors in film history-whose greatest role was probably himself. -American Masters: Cary Grant: A Class Apart

Above: you don't usually associate the words "mussed" and "drunk" with Cary Grant, but here they are during the production of North by Northwest. Courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

"Have you planned your vacation yet? You've a choice between sand and sunburn or mountain-climbing and the Charlie-horse. I find it all very elevating, but we should all have some kind of holiday. So my suggestion is a quiet little tour, say, about 2000 miles. I have just made a motion picture, North By Northwest, to show you some of these delights. And the ideal place to start our holiday fun trip is New York, where Cary Grant can go places and do things. You don't find a tasteful little murder on every guided tour, now do you? But this means we must leave Manhattan." -A guided tour with Alfred Hitchcock

THE SOUND OF HITCHCOCK

Join Academy Award-winning sound designers as they reveal how Alfred Hitchcock employed sound to make audience members leap from their seats in fright or crawl under them from excruciating suspense.

PURE CINEMA: THROUGH THE EYES OF HITCHCOCK

Director Martin Scorsese is our guide into the power and mastery of Hitchcock's visual style, breaking down landmark sequences from Vertigo, The Birds and Psycho.

IN THE MASTER'S SHADOW: HITCHCOCK'S LEGACY

Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, William Friedkin and many others celebrate the enduring legacy of the man many consider the greatest filmmaker the medium has yet produced. Discover why Alfred Hitchcock's movies thrill audiences and inspire filmmakers, who continue to employ his cinematic techniques to this day.

SAUL BASS: TITLE CHAMP

Directors Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro and others pay tribute to Saul Bass, who revolutionized the art of movie titles.

BERNARD HERRMANN: HITCHCOCK'S MAESTRO

Bernard Herrmann was perhaps the preeminent film composer of the 20th century. Holding a significant fan base throughout the years, he is one of the most talked about film composers, the subject of many discussions and scholarly papers. He worked with legendary filmmakers such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Ray Harryhausen, and composed historic films such as Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Psycho. His unique music certainly commanded attention, whether or not you are a serious fan of the music. It certainly was interesting and imaginative music that held substantial dramatic impact. -The Nature of Bernard Herrmann's Music

An illuminating portrait of one of Alfred Hitchcock's most important collaborators, film composer Bernard Herrmann.

Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest. Photographed by Kenny Bell © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.

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'North by Northwest': Quite Possibly the Most Entertaining Hitchcock Ever * Cinephilia & Beyond

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"I want to do a Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures," allegedly announced screenwriter Ernest Lehman, after his friend, composer Bernard Herrmann recommended him to Alfred Hitchcock.

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"North By Northwest," Alfred Hitchcock's new study of the vagaries of the nervous system under pressure, is the brilliant realization of a feat he has unintentionally been moving toward for more than a decade-a perfect parody of his own work. (He is not alone on this peculiar self-maligning eminence, which is already crowded with such diverse and distinguished people as Picasso, Louis Armstrong, Hemingway, and Orson Welles.) Indeed, Hitchcock demonstrates himself to be a master parodist, for the picture, which he produced and directed and which was written by Ernest Lehman, first flawlessly reproduces all of his celebrated mannerisms, and then methodically puffs them all out of shape with a swaggering look-at-me exaggeration. (This exaggeration is helped immeasurably by two things: The picture lasts for a bloated two and a quarter hours, and it has been shot in cheerful color for a wide screen, devices that make the sinister figures on hand look like red-cheeked baby giants.) Thus, the story, which involves a successful Madison Avenue advertising man who is mistaken by enemy spies for a dangerous United States agent, is a hopelessly attenuated round of mistaken identity, cloak-and-dagger doings, sympathetic but helpless friendly agents, a double-dealing woman, and so forth. Cary Grant, who plays the ad man and is an old member of the Hitchcock stable, delivers his Hitchcock Grant-tight-lipped, tight-eyed, flippant, amorous-as he never has before; so much of the film has been photographed in familiar places-the streets of New York and Chicago, the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, inside Grand Central Station, at Mount Rushmore National Memorial-that one tends, because of the effect of innumerable shocks of recognition, to forget the story for its background; the endless chase sequences seem to chase each other; and, finally, Hitchcock's love of planting the grotesque in a commonplace setting, as if he were dropping water bombs out of a hotel window on a crowded sidewalk, is relied upon with such frequency-an official is stabbed in the back at the United Nations, Grant is hustled out of the Plaza lobby by two gunmen-that by the time the climax of the film is reached, atop Mount Rushmore, one is actually gratified when someone hurtles off George Washington's nose to his death.

There are two memorable scenes, in which Hitchcock really goes after himself. In the first, Grant, keeping a rendezvous at a crossroads on a deserted Illinois prairie, is pursued up and down a hot, rustling cornfield for ten or fifteen minutes, like a halfback having a nightmare, by a crop-dusting plane armed with a machine gun. And, in the second, he is forcibly made drunk on a quart of bourbon, put in a stolen sports car, and headed for a rocky cliff and a boiling sea below. The curious thing about this last scene is that it supposedly takes place in Glen Cove, Long Island, a sandy, flattish place where the Sound rarely gets more ruffled than the sailboat pond in Central Park. The locale does recall, however, the French Riviera, which long ago inspired some of Hitchcock's best work and which, understandably, he may feel nostalgic about now. In addition to Grant, the cast includes Eva Marie Saint as the troublesome woman, James Mason as the chief enemy agent, and Leo G. Carroll as a puffing, elderly Secret Service man. Everyone keeps a remarkably straight face throughout.

"The Scapegoat," a slow, wilted English-American picture-even its black-and-white photography looks faded-is based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier that dwelled pleasantly on the predicament of a dull, kindly English schoolmaster when he is tricked in to taking over the life of his double, a selfish, impoverished French count, whom he runs into in Paris. The movie's sole pleasure lies in watching Alec Guinness, who plays both men, and Bette Davis, who appears as the count's aging, bedraggled mother. Guinness repeatedly matches his quiet half-moon smiles and comfortable, sea-dog gait with Miss Davis's baking stares and heavily powdered speech habits, which suggest that she is portraying a college housemother who has seen better days. It's a dead heat. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the August 15, 1959, issue.

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Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," Reviewed

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"North By Northwest," Alfred Hitchcock's new study of the vagaries of the nervous system under pressure, is the brilliant realization of a feat he has unintentionally been moving toward for more than a decade-a perfect parody of his own work.

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How Hitchcock Turned the ‘Crop Duster Attack’ into a Cinematic Icon | North by Northwest

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About this Piece

Like North, Bernard Herrmann also had a solid musical grounding in New York, and was brought to Hollywood by another prestigious director, Orson Welles, with whom the composer had worked on the Mercury Theatre on the Air radio productions. Welles chose Herrmann to score his first film, the legendary Citizen Kane.

One of Herrmann's most celebrated scores is North by Northwest.The Overture is a driving toccata for symphony orchestra that provides a propulsive prelude to one of Hitchcock's most virtuosic and entertaining films. The entire piece is scored in 6/8 but, like Leonard Bernstein's "America" from West Side Story, the rhythm constantly alternates between measures of standard 6/8 (123-456) and 6/8 with a 3/4 (1&-2&-3&) pattern. This rhythmic alternation gives the entire piece an exciting, if slightly off-kilter feel appropriate to the constantly shifting "wrong man" machinations of the involved plot itself.

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North by Northwest Overture (Bernard Herrmann)

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Skip to page content About this Piece Like North, Bernard Herrmann also had a solid musical grounding in New York, and was brought to Hollywood by another prestigious director, Orson Welles, with whom the composer had worked on the Mercury Theatre on the Air radio productions.

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New York-born composer Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) wrote for every medium of his time: radio, television, movies, opera, stage and concert hall. But he became best known for his film scores - 50 of them, for some of the 20th century's greatest directors, including Orson Welles ("Citizen Kane"), Francois Truffaut ("Fahrenheit 451"), Martin Scorsese ("Taxi Driver") ... and Alfred Hitchcock.

Herrmann's seven scores for the director known as the "Master of Suspense" (eight if we include "Torn Curtain," which Hitchcock discarded), composed over a 10-year period beginning in 1955, are considered among the greatest in cinema history. Between the anxious, romantic "Vertigo" (1958) and the terrifying, all-strings "Psycho" (1960), came the dynamic music for "North by Northwest" (1959): "Hitchcock's most entertaining blend of sophisticated humor and suspense, with a crackling Herrmann score," notes the composer's biographer Steven Smith. (As part of the CSO at the Movies series, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Richard Kaufman, will perform a live-to-picture presentation of "North by Northwest" on Feb. 15.)

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman - whom Herrmann had introduced to Hitchcock a year or so earlier - wrote a clever and twist-filled script that was ultimately nominated for an Academy Award. The film follows Madison Avenue executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) who is mistaken for one "George Kaplan," apparently a top American intelligence agent, and is chased halfway across America by foreign spy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) and his minions. Roger finds himself attracted to the mysterious and seductive Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who may or may not be in league with the bad guys. Eventually a high-ranking government official (Leo G. Carroll) arrives on the scene to unravel the confusion, leading to a dangerous confrontation across the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

As the composer observed a few years later: "Most people think of Hitchcock as a master of mystery and suspense. Although this is fundamentally true, he is also a great romantic director, his films allowing enormous scope for sensual and lyrical musical treatment."

Herrmann ignored the MGM music department's suggestion that, as the movie opens in New York, he write something Gershwinesque to start. Instead, "its overture is a rapid, kaleidoscopic, virtuoso orchestral fandango designed to kick off the exciting rout that follows," the composer explained, its Spanish rhythms illustrating "the crazy dance about to take place between Cary Grant and the world." Saul Bass' brilliant directional titles form the background for Herrmann's "dazzling, dizzying overture," in Smith's words. Herrmann invokes this theme, and variations on it, throughout the film, driving the action and suspense, especially during the tense, climactic scenes on Mount Rushmore.

Other themes are heard throughout the score. First is a love theme, voiced by oboe and clarinet over gently propulsive string rhythms - notably during the conversation between Roger and Eve on the 20th Century Limited train to Chicago, but often heard when they are together and in the film's memorable final scene. Second is a motif for the mysterious George Kaplan: a dark, descending string line best heard during the negotiations between Thornhill and Vandamm in the tourist cafeteria at Mount Rushmore. Finally, there is the "hurry" motif associated with Thornhill's movement from place to place, especially during the auction scenes in Chicago.

Significantly, Hitchcock asked his composer to refrain from scoring the film's famous crop-duster scene, in which Roger - stranded in a Midwestern cornfield - is repeatedly attacked from the air by a small plane and barely survives. Only the noise of the aircraft and its machineguns, the whoosh of passing cars and the rustling of crops, is heard for four harrowing minutes.

Herrmann, who (unlike most American film composers) always insisted upon personally orchestrating every note of every score, composed the "North by Northwest" music between January and March 1959 and recorded the original soundtrack (approximately 65 minutes of music, broken up into 48 separate cues) in April and May. Released in July 1959, the film was widely considered among Hitchcock's best work, critically praised and his most commercially successful film to that time. It ranks 40th on the American Film Institute's list of Top 100 films, and its score is among the AFI's Top 250 (with Herrmann's "Vertigo" and "Psycho" placing in its Top 25).

"North by Northwest," notes Herrmann scholar Christopher Husted, "presented the composer with an opportunity to write a flamboyant, virtuosic score that liberally mixes sensuality, menace and, in a rare turn for him, light comedy ... the last of Alfred Hitchcock's fun-loving, stylish adventure films."
Jon Burlingame writes about film music for Variety and teaches film-music history at the University of Southern California. Note: Conductor Richard Kaufman and composer Bernard Herrmann's daughter, Dorothy, will appear onstage for a pre-concert conversation from 6:15 to 6:45 p.m. Feb.15. The event is open to all "North by Northwest" ticketholders.

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Bernard Herrmann's energetic score propels 'North by Northwest' - CSO Sounds & Stories

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New York-born composer Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) wrote for every medium of his time: radio, television, movies, opera, stage and concert hall. But he became best known for his film scores - 50 of them, for some of the 20th century's greatest directors, including Orson Welles ("Citizen Kane"), Francois Truffaut ("Fahrenheit 451"), Martin Scorsese ("Taxi Driver") ...

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Perhaps the best way to frame Hitchcock's 1959 thriller North by Northwest is to examine the least conspicuous word in its title: by. In the context of the film, 'by' represents a crossroads - a point of intersection between two paths that would otherwise never meet.

Consider protagonist Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant - a playboy ad executive who lands himself in trouble when he is mistaken for a spy and kidnapped, throwing his life into chaos as he plays an increasingly dangerous game of cat and mouse with his abductors and the authorities. And it's only because of this game that he meets Eve Kendall, played by Eva Marie Saint, a love interest who twice helps him evade capture.

Intersections are further explored in the transient locations Hitchcock chose to shoot: downtown cross streets, trains, airports - even the infamous crop-dusting scene, which takes place quite literally at a crossroads.

It is appropriate, then, that Saul Bass establishes this theme in both the tone and design of the main title sequence - his second Hitchcock outing, following the previous year. Almost immediately, the open canvas of forest green is jailed by a series of intersecting lines, setting the ground rules for the sequence by corralling the sans serif title blocks into vertical columns, rising and falling as though tethered to one another.

The sequence is split into three distinct tiers - the first being entirely graphic, with the titles superimposed over the gridded background. In the second, the graphics dissolve into the reflective façade of the C.I.T. Building in Manhattan - the location of Thornhill's agency - perfectly mimicking its orthographic window framework. The third tier brings us down to ground level, observing the anonymous masses navigating the Big Apple.

This progression from cold abstraction to perceived reality - symbolically reflected in the building's façade - to up-close and personal parallels Thornhill's journey through the film, mirroring both his plight and his changing identity over its course. It also draws the audience into human-scale conflict, where commuters do their best to ignore each other unless compelled otherwise, resulting in hostility. Bernard Hermann's big, climactic score gives the sequence a sense of increasing urgency, turning up the volume in concert with the march of the crowd.

Bass had experimented with graphic animation techniques as far back as The Seven Year Itch in 1955, but the title cards themselves had always remained static. North by Northwest is often credited as being the first sequence to use kinetic type - or simply, type in motion. It is also one of the first examples of situational type in film, where the text is integrated into the environment by matching its perspective, a technique famously revisited by Picture Mill for David Fincher's in 2002.

Although Bass was already an established designer by 1959, North by Northwest is likely his first truly modernist title sequence, adopting a clean, minimal style and a veneer of graphic sophistication previously unseen in his title work or elsewhere in mainstream film. It's a style that he carried into his next two projects, and Ocean's Eleven, and would revisit almost 30 years later for Goodfellas in 1990.

Titles Designed by: Saul Bass

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Perhaps the best way to frame Hitchcock's 1959 thriller North by Northwest is to examine the least conspicuous word in its title: by. In the context of the film, 'by' represents a crossroads - a point of intersection between two paths that would otherwise never meet.

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How North by Northwest Changed Cinema Forever

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There's a fascinating moment towards the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock's adventure-thriller classic, North by Northwest. Ad exec Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant, is running late for an appointment at the Plaza Hotel.

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In the 1950s, financial prosperity allowed young Americans to participate in a shared culture of rock and roll music, movies, and television.

In the 1950s and 1960s, young Americans had more disposable income and enjoyed greater material comfort than their forebears, which allowed them to devote more time and money to leisure activities and the consumption of popular culture.

Rock and roll, a new style of music which drew inspiration from African American blues music, embraced themes popular among teenagers, such as young love and rebellion against authority.

In the 1950s, the relatively new technology of television began to compete with motion pictures as a major form of popular entertainment.

The postwar boom and popular culture

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States emerged as the world's leading industrial power. Generous government support for education and home loans coupled with a booming economy meant that Americans in the postwar era had more discretionary income than ever before.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the bumper crop of children born after World War II, known collectively as the baby boomers, grew into teenagers and young adults. As the largest single generation up until that point in American history, the baby boomers had a tremendous effect on popular culture thanks to their sheer numbers. Starting as early as the 1940s, savvy marketers identified the baby boomers as a target demographic and marketed products and entertainment geared to their needs and interests.

The baby boomers developed a greater generational consciousness than previous generations. They sought to define and redefine their identities in numerous ways. The music of the day, especially rock and roll, reflected their desire to rebel against adult authority. Other forms of 1950s popular culture, such as movies and television, sought to entertain, while reinforcing values such as religious faith, patriotism, and conformity to societal norms.

Rocking around the clock

In the late 1940s, some white country musicians began to experiment with the rhythms of the blues, a decades-old musical genre of rural southern black people. This experimentation led to the creation of a new musical form known as rockabilly; by the 1950s, rockabilly had developed into rock and roll.

Rock and roll music celebrated themes such as young love and freedom from the oppression of middle-class society. It quickly grew in favor among American teens during the 1950s, thanks largely to the efforts of disc jockey Alan Freed. Freed named and popularized rock and roll by playing it on the radio in Cleveland-where he also organized the first rock and roll concert-and later in New York.

The theme of rebellion against authority, present in many rock and roll songs, appealed to teens. In 1954, rock group Bill Haley and His Comets provided youth with an anthem for their rebellion with the song "Rock Around the Clock." The song, used in the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle about a white teacher at a troubled inner-city high school, seemed to be calling for teens to declare their independence from adult control.

Haley illustrated how white artists could take musical motifs from African American musicians and achieve mainstream success. Teen heartthrob Elvis Presley rose to stardom doing the same. Thus, besides encouraging a feeling of youthful rebellion, rock and roll also began to tear down color barriers in popular culture, as white youths sought out African American musicians such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

While youth had found an outlet for their feelings and concerns, their parents were much less enthused about rock and roll and the rebellion and sexuality it seemed to promote. Many regarded the music as a threat to American values. When Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, a popular television variety program, the camera deliberately focused on his torso and did not show his swiveling hips or legs shaking in time to the music.

Despite adults' dislike of the genre, or perhaps because of it, more than 68 percent of the music played on the radio in 1956 was rock and roll.

Hollywood on the defensive

At first, Hollywood encountered difficulties in adjusting to the post-World War II environment. Although domestic audiences reached a record high in 1946 and the war's end meant expanding international markets too, the groundwork for the eventual dismantling of the traditional "studio system" was laid in 1948 in a landmark decision by the US Supreme Court. Previously, film studios had owned their own movie theater chains in which they exhibited the films they produced; however, in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., this vertical integration of the industry-the complete control by one firm of the production, distribution, and exhibition of motion pictures-was deemed a violation of antitrust laws.

Hollywood also felt the strain of Cold War fears. The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings targeted suspected Communists in Hollywood. When Senator Joseph McCarthy called eleven "unfriendly witnesses" to testify before Congress about Communism in the film industry in October 1947, only playwright Bertolt Brecht answered questions. The other 10, who refused to testify, were cited for contempt of Congress on November 24. The next day, film executives declared that the so-called "Hollywood Ten" would no longer be employed in the industry until they had sworn they were not Communists.

Eventually, more than three hundred actors, screenwriters, directors, musicians, and other entertainment professionals were placed on the industry blacklist. Some never worked in Hollywood again; others directed films or wrote screenplays under assumed names.

Hollywood reacted aggressively to these various challenges. Filmmakers tried new techniques, like CinemaScope and Cinerama, which allowed movies to be shown on large screens and in 3-D. Audiences were drawn to movies not because of gimmicks, however, but because of the stories they told. Dramas and romantic comedies continued to be popular fare for adults.

To appeal to teens, studios produced large numbers of horror films and movies starring music idols such as Elvis. Many films took espionage, a timely topic, as their subject matter, and science fiction hits such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers -about a small town whose inhabitants fall prey to space aliens-played on audience fears of both Communist invasion and nuclear technology.

The triumph of television

By far the greatest challenge to Hollywood, however, came from the relatively new medium of television. Although the technology had been developed in the late 1920s, through much of the 1940s only a fairly small, wealthy audience had access to it. As a result, programming had been limited.

With the post-World War II economic boom, however, all this changed. By 1955, half of all American homes had a television.

Various types of programs were broadcast on the handful of major networks: situation comedies, variety programs, game shows, soap operas, talk shows, medical dramas, adventure series, cartoons, and police procedurals.

Many comedies presented an idealized image of white suburban family life: happy housewife mothers, wise fathers, and mischievous but not dangerously rebellious children were constants on shows like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best in the late 1950s. These shows also reinforced certain perspectives on the values of individualism and family-values that came to be redefined as "American" in opposition to alleged Communist collectivism.

Westerns, which stressed unity in the face of danger and the ability to survive in hostile environments, were popular too. Programming designed specifically for children began to emerge with shows such as Captain Kangaroo, Romper Room, and The Mickey Mouse Club designed to appeal to members of the baby boom.

What do you think?

What can popular culture tell us about a historical time period? Are trends in music, film, and television important for understanding an era? Why or why not?

Why do you think rock and roll became so popular?

What messages about American values were promoted by popular culture in the 1950s?

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Popular culture and mass media in the 1950s (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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The 1950s could be called the advertiser's dream decade. World War II was over. The postwar economy had rebounded. Prosperity seemed like a sure thing. Americans were ready to buy homes, cars, clothes and products to validate their leisurely lifestyles. And advertisers were eager to sell goods. This time they had a more powerful tool than print ads: television.

Advertising boomed in the 1950s because of America's culture at the time and TV's massive reach. Consumer consumption peaked at a historically high level. The end of World War II signaled the end of a thrift-based consciousness that Americans had held since the Great Depression. Goods, no longer as scarce as they were during the war, flowed into the marketplace. Credit was easy. Purchases could be made on "time." And advertisers were relentlessly urging consumers to "buy, buy, buy," writes Young. Consumers felt closer to the American Dream than in the previous decades.

Advertisers saw a potential gold mine when TV debuted in 1941. Television had sound and movement. Print ads, by contrast, were two-dimensional and static. Advertisers began a slow trek to TV by the early 1950s. A major drawback was the advertising cost; sponsors were spending between $10,000 to $20,000 for 1-minute spots - 10 times more than for radio ads, according to William H. Young in his book " The 1950s".

Advertisers began limiting TV commercials to 30 seconds to save money. The lure of the new medium and potential for wealth eventually beat out price. In 1951, TV earned $41 million in advertising revenue, a small fortune by today's multibillion-dollar figures. Just two years later, that figure rose to $336 million. America had an electronic mall by the mid-'50s. By 1959, TV commercials could reach 90 percent of all U.S. households, the only medium with that capability.

TV became the first medium to make selling products its main purpose. Program content was secondary, unlike with radio. Ad agencies helped their TV-sponsor clients pick the shows that would air and decide on the content. A sponsor could refuse to let a competing auto manufacturer's car appear in a scene or allow an actor to smoke cigars if the sponsor sold cigarettes. Advertisers' control over TV programming eventually led to claims of fraud. Quiz-show investigations brought rigging charges against producers, forcing TV network executives to step in and take over program production. By the end of the decade, advertisers were relegated to buying airtime.

The products sold on TV defined the '50s. Ads for detergent, kitchen appliances, TV dinners and large-finned cars dominated the airwaves, according to Linda's Nostalgia Cafe. Advertisers played up TV's capacity for action with animation. Ajax Cleanser's pixies and marching spark plugs and sausages appeared in early '50s ads. Animated figures such as Speedy Alka-Seltzer, Gillette's Sharpie the parrot, Mr. Clean and the Jolly Green Giant entertained TV viewers in later ads.

The advertising industry pushed celebrity endorsements; Loretta Young inconspicuously promoted detergent, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz smoked their sponsor's cigarettes, and Frank Sinatra sang about shampoo. Popular TV cowboys stepped out of character to pitch breakfast cereals and other youth-oriented products. Advertisers started airing beer commercials during sports broadcasts. Budweiser's iconic Clydesdales first appeared in 1950s advertising commercials and can be seen today in holiday and Super Bowl ads.

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What Caused the Advertising Industry Boom in the 1950s?

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What Caused the Advertising Industry Boom in the 1950s?. The 1950s could be called the advertiser's dream decade. World War II was over. The postwar economy had rebounded. Prosperity seemed like a sure thing. Americans were ready to buy homes, cars, clothes and products to validate their leisurely lifestyles. And ...

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History of Advertising 1950s We often discuss current issues on this blog, but it's important to remember our roots. Sometimes when you look back at history, it can inspire ideas for the future. At the very least, you'll learn something. This week, we'll cover the 1950s.
The 1950s were an exciting time. Sinatra, Elvis... "Some Like It Hot". The 1950s were considered both The Golden Era of 3D Cinematography and the Golden Age of Television. With the war ending and families being reunited, a huge increase in population erupted: The Baby Boom. In 1952 alone, 3.9 million babies were born and an average of 4 million babies were born every year after that. Advertisers saw this as an opportunity to address consumer needs and desires, particularly those of women. Need to lose that baby weight? The 1950s is where the obsession of body image and weight came into play. Women would buy any- and everything if it would help them stay slim; they were obsessed with dieting. Advertisers began promoting bath salts, suction cups, candy and even belts - all the things that were sure to help women keep their slim, sexy figures.

The rise of targeting specific demographics started in this decade. Teenagers, who were forming their own subculture for the first time ever, were seen as a lucrative demographic to target due to the fact that they had disposable incomes and an influence over parental spending habits. They were regular consumers of food, music, and of course - TV.

By 1951, regular TV programming reached the West Coast, establishing national coverage. TV became the driving force for advertising. Some memorable TV spots during this time period were for Alka-Seltzer, Ajax, and Frosted Flakes. Anacin really took the leap into TV advertising and showed how beneficial it could truly be. Their main advertising tactic was repetition; they consistently repeated the phrase "fast, fast, fast relief". With this tactic, Anacin's sales increased significantly.

Many agencies began using motivational research to help advertisers influence their consumers based on their need for safety, sex, belonging, and success. They used psychological tools to examine their spending habits. They created personalities that the everyday consumer could relate to or aspire to become: The Marlboro Man, Maidenform Woman, The Hathaway Shirt Man. Product personification became a prominent tactic.

Advertising, in any age, is largely shaped by the cultural, social, and political environment that surrounds it. Here are a few events - both major and minor - that had a huge influence on daily life throughout the 50s.
1950 - First organ transplant 1951 - Color TV was born 1952 - Seat belts are introduced 1953 - DNA is discovered 1954 - Report says cigarettes cause cancer 1955 - Disneyland opens; McDonald's is founded 1956 - Remote control is invented 1957 - Sputnik launches in space 1958 - NASA founded 1959 - Castro becomes dictator of Cuba

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History of Advertising 1950s We often discuss current issues on this blog, but it's important to remember our roots. Sometimes when you look back at history, it can inspire ideas for the future. At the very least, you'll learn something. This week, we'll cover the 1950s. The 1950s were an exciting time.

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Web Design | Small Business | Marketing | Roundpeg

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Advertising in the 1950s Had No Chill | Ad Trends | Roundpeg

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The history of American advertising has always fascinated me. It's amazing to see how much the visual aesthetic evolved as a result of the changing times.

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You know her the moment she's on screen: she's got the best lines and the best wardrobe. She's having more fun than anyone else around her-which usually means she'll have to be punished by film's end. The femme fatale isn't a trope that originated with film noir-you can make strong arguments for shades of the femme fatale in biblical Eve, Ishtar, the Sirens, Medusa, and Circe. Anywhere a hero needs a test or a scapegoat, you'll find her. But film noir is where she's best embodied and remembered.

In the 1940s and 50s, she was a projection of misogynistic inadequacy: the dangerous woman who lures a good man to his doom or moral compromise for her own gain. While you were unlikely to find this exact iteration of the femme fatale at the local watering hole, she did have (less lurid) real-life roots: off the screen, women had entered the workforce en masse during WWII, and the 1950s image of the "New Woman," meant to celebrate women's post-war return to the home, was more a male fantasy than an actuality. In her second filmic heydey, the neo-noir films of the 1980s and 1990s, sexual mores shifted, the 80s brought reactions against women's liberation, and third wave feminists fought for workplace equality and freedom from sexual assault. Her embodiment remains much the same-she's still largely a borderline cartoonish Black Widow, sexually insatiable and out for blood-but with one crucial difference: the film doesn't have to end with her downfall. In the midst of the #MeToo movement and the Trump presidency, the femmes fatales is once again revitalized. With such straightforward crime movies as Hustlers, as well as cross-genre forays such as Midsommar ( not strictly either a crime film or a film noir), the 2019 film slate shows that while the perception of the femme fatale has changed, she's not yet dead.

The trope of the femme fatale in film is most problematic (and the clearest embodiment of the anxieties of the day) when she's in a contemporary film. Femme fatales rendered in throwback films or literature (for example, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown or Daphne in Devil in a Blue Dress) fare comparatively well to their contemporary counterparts, in terms of motivation, backstory, and humanization. Historicizing her seems to give enough distance to use the trope as a critique; in contemporary film, she's more commonly used as an expression of current anxiety.
Film noir heydey
There's an embarrassment of great femme fatales to point to in the heydey of film noir. Using her sizzle, she pulled our everyman hero into a pit of vipers or danger or enticed him into murder. In her golden era of the film noirs of the 1940s and 50s, she's defined by her sex appeal, her obvious dangerousness (a stark contrast to the not-so-distant Victorian ideal of pliant femininity), and her refusal to play by society's rules. She was fun, she was sexy, and she was going to get you killed. She might've been born from a reductive stereotype but she also offered actresses the chance to play someone fun, someone evil-right up until she's apprehended or killed, setting the world of the film back to moral rights.

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Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson of Double Indemnity wore a blonde wig (described by Billy Wilder as "obviously phony"), an anklet, and an attitude of such blatant trouble that she's barely five minutes into her meet-deadly with Fred McMurray's Walter Neff before she's flirtatiously floating the idea of murder. Neff should know better, and does, but can't help himself. By the film's end, Phyllis is killed byr Neff, a moment cinematically held up as the hero (rather, anti-hero) conquering the villain despite the fact that they plotted and orchestrated a murder together. Neff gets his, but he also gets to kill the woman who lured him to his doom along the way. He restores order to his world by taking her out of it before expiring himself.
You know her the moment she's on screen: she's got the best lines and the best wardrobe. She's having more fun than anyone else around her-which usually means she'll have to be punished by film's end.
At the end of the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, Brigid O'Shaugnessy, arguably the prototype for the on-screen femme fatale, is revealed to be the true evil behind the mystery of the Maltese Falcon detective Sam Spade is tasked with unraveling (as well as the murderer of his partner). Brigid will eventually find herself in jail, but it's not enough for her to simply receive punishment for her crimes; first, her charms must be actively rejected by our hero so that order can be restored. It's not sufficient that Brigid is caught: she has to be handed over to the authorities by Spade.

It's not fair to blame the demise of the femme fatale in the majority of her movies simply upon cinematic misogyny: Hollywood was still ruled by the Hays Code, which allowed for immoral hijinks to take place on screen as long as the moral universe was restored at the end. The femme fatale could only be fun, sexual, and deadly so long as she died or went to jail in the end. One major exception to this is Rita Hayworth's Gilda, the bizarre ending of which underwrites literally all of the character and plot development that came before it and which, I am nearly positive, makes for one of the most fascinating, bizarre, and upsetting closing scenes in all of film noir: a happily unearned romantic ending. It's still a neutering via the Hays Code-Gilda is not, despite all prior evidence, a spurned woman taking out her rage and heartbreak on her husband and former lover by sleeping her way through Argentina. Instead, she's just been pretending to do so-she's been loyal this whole time, didn't ya know! Cue credits. It's almost more upsetting than the death of Phyllis Dieterichson.
The bitch lives
The femme fatale reappears in the erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s (although perhaps she never really left) although she had evolved in more ways than one. Kathleen Turner's Matty Walker from the 1981 neo-noir film Body Heat was a femme whose fatality stemmed as much from her shrewd intellect as it did from her rapacious (and overtly on-screen) sexuality. Perhaps the movie is best remembered as a remake of Double Indemnity where the implicit sexual undercurrent that shimmed through both Cain's original novel and Raymond Chandler's screenplay of the film is made overt and onscreen, but I see it as a different sort of shift. Unlike her screen sisters of old, whose downfall was a way of returning order to the hero's world, Matty Walker (nee Mary Ann Simpson) waltzes away scot-free, the cash from her dead husband funding her new exotic lifestyle while her lover rots in jail for a murder they both planned (and which he executed).

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Or, take one of the most famous of all modern screen femmes fatale, Sharon Stone's labia-flashing Catherine Trammell in Basic Instinct. The leg cross that launched a thousand parodies is by-far the most remembered image from the film-an image, it should be noted, that Sharon Stone claims she did not authorize and that she was not aware of it being included in the final film until a screening with a test audience. But I'm struck by its close: Catherine atop Michael Douglas, an ice pick stashed under the bed for the moment she decides to use it. The film judges her and sexualizes her, but she comes out literally on top, at least for the moment.

She might not have gained much more interiority, dimensionality, or perspective of her own-both Matty Walker and Catherine Trammell are compelling but secondary characters in their respective films-but film started to do better by its film fatales than positing a world in which they had to be killed, arrested, or neutered for audiences to feel secure.
The femme fatale as Robin Hood
A century after Theda Bara's "baby vamp" silverscreen routine created a blueprint for the aesthetic of the femme fatale onscreen, her cinematic status endures-with a few key shifts. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was a masterful resurrection and flipping of the femme fatale trope. By 2012, when the book was published, readers were used to the real-life proliferation of news stories about pretty white women who go missing only to find out, whoops, their philandering husband killed them. New millenium femme fatale Amy Dunne was the perfect antidote to this, setting her husband up to be accused of murder in order to right the wrongs she's suffered at his hands. You might not want to cross her in real life, but she wasn't unsympathetic: her infamous "cool girl" speech remains a sort of rallying cry for plenty of women. And while Catherine Trammell's story closed with the ice pick under the bed, Amy Dunne has another smoking gun in her arsenal: wielding her unborn child as a weapon against her husband to keep him exactly where she wants him. She's a crazy bitch, the progenitor of a million questions about "likeability" in female characters, and the antiheroine of our century.
In every iteration over the years, the kernel of danger at the femme fatales core is that she's out for herself: she doesn't exist in service to or for men.
The late-summer crime film Hustlers debuted in September 2019 and as of the end of October 2019, had grossed more than $110 million worldwide. Featuring Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu, the star-studded ensemble cast bilks unsuspecting Wall Street doofs out of thousands of dollars via a team of talented female scammers (and the aid of some party drugs and booze). The film, directed by Lorene Scafaria and based on real events written up in an article by Jessica Pressler, undoubtedly plays into the tropes of the femme fatales (none of the marks end up dead but their wallets sure are made lighter by this entrepreneurial sisterhood).

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But the biggest difference is the way in which these femmes fatales are viewed and not viewed: Lopez's Ramona and Wu's Destiny/Dorothy are given fully realized backstories, interior lives, and motivations. Despite the salacious possibilities of a movie with strippers as main characters, and featuring plenty of female (and male!) nudity, these women's bodies are never offered up as consumption for the male gaze (undoubtedly due in no small part to the female-helmed direction and the reported intimacy coach always on set). And the movie makes sure to hammer the point home that these women are enacting, in their own way, a version of the American Dream that their male countertops/marks on Wall Street are chasing, no less unethically. These femme fatales are closer to less altruistic Robin Hood figures: robbing the rich to even the playing field. These femmes fatale aren't just sympathetic; they're actually human.

Another 2019 film makes use of shades of the femme fatale trope, albeit in a more roundabout way. By the end of Ari Aster's Midsommar (not strictly a noir, and not just because it takes place in virtually zero actual darkness), its much put-upon heroine Dani (played by Florence Pugh) ultimately frees herself from a bad relationship, a bad man, and a bad life by...literally lighting it on fire. But because the audience has been on Dani's side from the beginning-it's more or less her story-it's framed as a happy ending, with Pugh's face creasing into a slight smile as she watches her former lover burn in the closing image of the film. It's chilling and perfect and uplifting and it turns Dani into a literal femme fatale, as well as being our hero.

The study of the femme fatale traditionally focuses on the way she becomes a locus for male anxiety. While I don't disagree with that, it's still another way of studying her by placing her in service to men. She's not just dangerous to men, she exists only because of men. But is it so hard to believe that the most vibrant, witty, wise-cracking and ambitious character on screen has motivations of her own? Alice Munro once said: "To be a femme fatale, you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb." In every iteration over the years, the kernel of danger at the femme fatales core is that she's out for herself: she doesn't exist in service to or for men. There's something individual and hungry driving her and it makes her dangerous. But maybe one day, that'll just be how we see women on screen all the time. Separate from the danger they pose to men, separate from the anger they feel towards men. A dame in search of her own destiny.

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The Evolution of the Femme Fatale in Film Noir

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You know her the moment she's on screen: she's got the best lines and the best wardrobe. She's having more fun than anyone else around her-which usually means she'll have to be punished by film's end.

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One method Hitchcock used in increasing the suspense level was by having the camera playfully roam around looking for something or someone suspicious. This way, the audience not only feels like they're involved in solving the mystery, but they also feel like they're one step ahead of the character.

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Independent film director Jeffrey Michael Bays, a life-long fan of Alfred Hitchcock, has compiled these articles to further spread the brilliant simplicity of Hitchcock's creative genius. http://www.borgus.com/hitch/

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Everyone knows that all Alfred Hitchcock films have a lot in common, all that is Alfred Hitchcock. The mark he left on each of his movies is indelible and undeniable, comparable to the mark any of history's greatest painters left on their art. As a result, finding a common theme or plot running through each of his films was not a difficult thing to do. What was difficult was finding one element, a thread that runs through each, to focus on in considering a Hitchcock-themed piece. So I left it up to my eyes, my senses, to decide what that one thread would be that connects a few of his films into one cohesive essay. I must say it didn't take long for the most obvious thread to become apparent, his visual signature. This is an attempt to discuss that in the simplest way possible - a near impossible task given the wealth and quality of films from which to choose. But here goes and I warn that spoilers lay ahead.

Alfred Hitchcock was a fan of Pure Cinema. Pure Cinema is the telling of a story via film by using strong visuals, as opposed to lengthy dialogue, to process/further the narrative. That is the way Hitchcock directed his films, emphasizing the visual, something that makes perfect sense given he started his career as a director in silent films where visuals were the most important element in the telling of a story. Subsequently, he would retain the visual elements in the forefront of all his films and his use of them would become, in my opinion, his greatest achievement, his most recognizable signature, and what would truly define his genius.

It must be mentioned that aside from the visual, Alfred Hitchcock's films also have a strong thematic connection as they all feature varying degrees of intrigue, suspense, murder, romance, sexuality and dark humor. Or, they center around a wrongly accused man, many deal with patriotism, or international espionage, and most tell stories of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. When I watch a Hitchcock movie, however, what I find most compelling isn't the story he tells, but the way he shows it to me. Several of his films, for instance, feature extensive chases where the protagonist has to go to great lengths to avoid capture. The important element in these cases is the running, the encounters, the avoidance - it is never the why. The why is rarely fully explained in any of his films and Hitchcock himself thought the why didn't matter to audiences. He called this why the McGuffin and explained it as a nonsensical device used to motivate the action and suspense. Simply, this small somewhat confusing, inconsequential thing in many of Hitchcock's films is one of the reasons he was such a genius in storytelling because he made his films so visually compelling that nobody cared why the suspicious situation arose in the first place. What mattered was the action that ensued as a result of the McGuffin, but the McGuffin could be anything at all.

In The 39 Steps the McGuffin takes the form of some missing papers that in the end turn out to be Mr. Memory's recollection of some government's secrets. Which government the secrets pertain to is never stated and it turns out to be of no consequence as what drives this film is all that Richard Hannay goes through to clear his name. In The Lady Vanishes the McGuffin is a tune that's a pact between two European countries. Again here, the fact that the lady vanishes and that the others search for her is the film. The audience doesn't care one bit about the tune or what it represents. In the McGuffin is uranium ore in the form of black sand hidden in wine bottles by German agents. However, in the scene where Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman discover the sand what's compelling is the suspense that results from the possibility that these will be discovered in the wine cellar. The sand is simply what gets them in that predicament in the first place. In North by Northwest the McGuffin is given the least amount of attention of all the films. It is described in two words, "government secrets." Nothing more is ever mentioned about the why Richard Thornhill (Cary Grant's character) has to make a cross-country run for his life - and honestly, who cares why. The fun is in watching Cary Grant getting in and out of one dangerous situation after another.

Locations and settings used by Alfred Hitchcock in his films say a lot about the importance of everything visual. In a Hitchcock film a location is not background but an integral part of the story and scene. This is as important and recognizable a visual an element in his films as any other because in many cases these settings have become part of the Hitchcockian visual signature. If you are a fan of Hitchcock's films you can name any number of memorable, famous scenes that feature very familiar, often iconic locations and symbols - the Statue of Liberty, Mt. Rushmore, the United Nations, and the Golden Gate Bridge, to name a few. All of these are American symbols that are normally pure and/or welcoming. Yet he chooses to film them in a way where they become dangerous and menacing. While most directors would use sites such as these as backdrops to whatever the action is, Hitchcock uses them as characters, as important as the one who clings for dear life from their rafters.

Alfred Hitchcock carefully dictated through his camera what we should think and feel while watching his films. Yes, that's what directors do. But the extent to which Hitchcock controls his audience is unequaled. He was a master manipulator - direct and purposeful in every shot so as to leave absolutely nothing to chance. There are two great examples to illustrate techniques he uses to emphasize things and/or emotion in his films - the manipulation. The first is the deliberate ways in which he shows us props that are central to particular scenes or plots in his films. He often uses a slow panning into objects, extreme close-ups or an in-your-face freezing of an item. Examples of this "special" presentation of props are numerous. The newspaper the husband in the shack hands over to Hannay so we are able to read the headlines in The 39 Steps, the close-ups of the poisoned brandy glass in the dining car in The Lady Vanishes, the close-up of the ring Charlie is wearing as she descends the stairs in her house in Shadow of a Doubt, the close-ups of Bruno's tie in Strangers on a Train, the matchbook with the initials R.O.T. in North by Northwest shown in a freeze frame to emphasize its importance, and the best, most famous example, the crane shot that starts from high above in , which ends in an extreme close-up of Ingrid Bergman's hand holding the key to the wine cellar. All of these are seconds long, they all move the story along and all tell volumes about the narrative power of Alfred Hitchcock. Each item mentioned here plays an integral part in the plot of each film and the way he filmed them ensured that each is recognizable to the audience later in the story.

Another "manipulation" tool is the way his actors are required to show their emotions and reactions only on their faces. This is present in all of his films, it's a pattern, a signature. The acting in his films is nearly always excellent and very effective. But it is also very deliberate, and oftentimes exaggerated. In some way it can be argued that the actor was just another prop to him as he uses them, in so many instances, for reaction shots only - sudden, brief. In his films we can see countless shifting eyes to enhance suspicion, countless shots of wide eyes to promote fear and many scenes of people posing - all one expression at a time. We are told when fear, anxiety, guilt or suspicion is appropriate and this rings true in every single one of the films mentioned below.

In an interview associated with the promotion of the DVD years back, Kim Novak said that while shooting that film Hitchcock told her that she had a lot of expression on her face and that he wanted none of it! He only wanted her to show (on her face) to the audience what she was thinking at that particular moment. That sums it up perfectly. In each and every performance from each of these films we are always privy to the exact thoughts of the characters. The reaction shots help us identify with these people up on the big screen. But to cement the identification Hitchcock goes a step further, he often shows us the action from their perspective. So, aside from knowing what characters think, we see what they see. In nearly all of these films there are shots of people moving straight toward the camera, toward the protagonist, ultimately toward us. Because of these images we become a part of the film, active participants, as what happens to them seems to happen to us. There is no greater way for a filmmaker to manipulate us as an audience member than to grab us by the throat and bring us into the film. In we see Fry lunge at us while at the top of the Statue of Liberty, in Strangers on a Train we see Bruno kicking at us as if we were his adversary on the merry-go-round in that film's climax. Also in that film Hitchcock twists this technique a bit while Bruno is strangling Miriam (Casey Rogers). Bruno steps in front of the camera so that he takes our place, in short we are the ones choking her (and we are strangers like they). In we are introduced to Sebastian's colleagues just as Alicia is (Ingrid Bergman's character). We take her place in the sequence and become the camera's lens, completely in her perspective so as she shakes each man's hand, so do we. We are in the action and none of it is by chance.

These are but a few examples of the visual elements and techniques that are easily recognizable in all films by this great director but in reality his true signature is seen throughout each film in every shot in every scene. His use of odd, skewed angles, wide sweeping shots that often end in tight close-ups, long sequences with no dialogue, his spectacular use of color (1950s films) and equally spectacular use of shadows, the ever popular Hitchcock cameo, the look and style of his leading ladies, his use of dark humor, and the circular shots that pan around the actors, particularly in romantic scenes. Of this last technique I have to give two examples because they're memorable and worthy of special mention (they are also two of my favorites). The first is in Notorious (1946). While Devlin and Alicia (Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman) are in the balcony of her hotel room they embrace and kiss. Hitchcock pans around them so we see all angles of these amazing-looking people (and no doubt he felt they looked amazing too) but he does so in a long, uncut sequence that seems to last forever. It has a very sensual effect and what he creates is an uncomfortable feeling that we shouldn't be watching these two people for this long a time sharing this moment (but it's spectacular).

In North by Northwest (1959) he used a similar shot to get the same effect. We see the couple (Grant and Eva Marie Saint) embrace and kiss but this time the camera stays steady as they roll along against the wall.
Since I can't seem to stop gushing about this astounding talent, following are a few specifics on a number of Alfred Hitchcock films. These are mere examples of his legacy and vision. And whenever I manage to stop gawking, oohing and aahing, I try to focus on his visual signature and theme as relates to each.
The 39 Steps (1935) is about an ordinary, innocent, man who is somehow framed for murder by circumstantial evidence and thrust into extraordinary situations. Add some common (but exciting) Hitchcock elements - international espionage, mystery, multiple identities, a blonde girl who's his adversary but who happens to be attached to him (literally in this case as they are handcuffed together) and you have a very enjoyable movie.

The Hitchcock signature is clear throughout The 39 Steps. The killing of the girl by the knife and the way she is found - reminiscent of countless other murder scenes in countless other Hitchcock films. The landlady who finds the body screams in horror but her screams are replaced by the whistle of a train as that scene fades to the next. That train then takes on the familiar setting for several scenes in the film. It is where Hannay (Robert Donat) first meets Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) and where he is able to read newspaper stories of the murder that occurred in his apartment the day before. (Newspapers are another familiar item in many Hitchcock films as he uses headlines and stories to aid in the narrative). And the use of a newspaper is again seen in the best visual scene in this film. The scene when Hannay goes to the shack where he finds the married couple, the kind wife and not so kind husband. This scene has a really nice exchange between Hannay and the wife that is just another example of the power of the visual versus the vocal in that the entire exchange is done with looks and glances.

In the end, Hannay and Pamela rid themselves of their physical attachments (the handcuffs) but by that time they are emotionally attached. They find their freedom, Hannay is able to clear his name and Mr. Memory dies with the McGuffin in his head.

This is a great movie that has a similar plot to North by Northwest, which Hitchcock directed more than twenty years later. The fact that he was to remake his own film (and it's not the only time he did so during his career) shows that he was not all that interested in the stories but in finding innovative ways to show us the details and emotions. Even if his innovative way was simply a new camera angle or the addition of color, the effects would be as profound and enjoyable.

The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the last film Alfred Hitchcock would make in England before his move to Hollywood. The plot of The Lady Vanishes is quite simple. While traveling on a train a nice, innocent-looking old lady vanishes after she is befriended by a younger woman traveling on the same train. Though several people had witnessed the lady's presence on the train it is questionable whether she was a figment of the younger woman's imagination because no clues can be found as to her existence. Much tension, frustration and suspicion ensue before the old woman reappears. And surprise, she turns out to be not an innocent old lady but a spy with knowledge of international secrets. As with other Hitchcock films the plot here is fun as we try to figure out what happened to Ms. Froy, which rhymes with joy. But the really entertaining part of this film is watching it unfold.

From the very beginning of The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock has our undivided attention and the tension begins to build as a singer (who sounds like he's moaning) is strangled. This scene is fairly creepy and sets a dire tone right off the bat. Hitchcock also used a train whistle throughout the journey depicted here that sounded eerily like a woman's shriek. It startles me every single time I watch this movie.

Ms. Froy (Dame May Whitty) has a nice meal with her new friend, Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), in the dining car of the train. She writes her name on the window to make sure Iris understands it. Later, we see the name again accompanied by the scary train whistle/shriek and we know something sinister is afoot. When Iris awakes the next day to find Ms. Froy is missing we see the process and her realization through her eyes (perspective) as the camera slowly pans from face to face of the people in her compartment. There's a lot of action and intrigue as Iris and her male companion, Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), who becomes her love interest, search for the missing woman. Much of the suspense in this film comes from the setting in the train, its close quarters, the shifting eyes of all the passengers (he purposely makes them all seem guilty), odd sounds, a villainous doctor and, as is the true test of a Hitchcock film, from the chase, rather than the outcome. Ms. Froy is saved in the end and she is seen fleeing from the train taking the McGuffin with her.

In Saboteur (1942) we see the typical Hitchcock protagonist in the character of Barry Kane, played by a very young Robert Cummings. Kane crosses the country looking for a Saboteur who was responsible for his best friend's death and for whose crime he is being wrongly accused. Kane goes from pursuer to pursued and encounters many different and distinct characters and situations along his journey, including the requisite girl who suspects him and then falls for him becoming his biggest ally in the end.

Much of the scenery and backgrounds used in this film look like sets, rather than authentic sites along roads, etc., however, none of that has any impact on the outcome or the action throughout the film. The suspense and the main character's paranoia build beautifully as even signs along the road point to Kane's guilt or impending peril. One even reads "you're being followed" and there's nothing subtle about that. The sign is but another example of how, if given the choice, Hitchcock would choose a picture over a word every time.

Signature Hitchcockian visual elements are evident in from start to finish. We see the close-ups of the letter in the beginning that lead Kane to find Tobin (Otto Kruger), the evil mastermind in the film, and a close-up of another letter in Tobin's house later in the story. The use of a train as a setting - it is where Kane and Pat (Priscilla Lane, the girl) meet the circus performers (which incidentally have some similarities to a few of the peripheral characters in The Lady Vanishes), and the most famous moment in the film, the Statue of Liberty scene where the film climaxes. Aside from the obvious mentioned above about Hitchcock and his use of famous/familiar symbols, this scene has two great and typical Hitchcock shots in it that are worth mentioning. The first is the way Hitchcock shot Fry's (Norman Lloyd) jacket breaking apart stitch by stitch as the thread is the only thing keeping him from falling to his death. The other is the way Hitchcock chose to use only the sound of roaring wind as what we hear as Fry hangs there. The fact that we hear nothing but the wind enhances the suspense and terror as Fry hangs on for his life. As much as I love film music, the fact it is often overused make music-less scenes memorable.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is said to be Alfred Hitchcock's favorite of his films because of the characterization and the setting, which is a small, typical, quiet American town. Ted Haimes' 1999 documentary, Dial "H" for Hitchcock mentions how he hated filming on location because he liked everything set up exactly as he wanted in the comfort of a soundstage. However, he chose to film this movie on location and, as usual, his instincts were right. The small town feeling of wholesomeness and neighborly affection is ever-present and adds a lot to the contrast between the town and its sinister visitor. The other films discussed prior to this one entailed stories of travel where the menace is somewhere else or something hidden and foreign. Here, the menace comes to you and it is familiar, admired and loved. This film feels different and I attribute that to the fact that it doesn't chase, it creeps.

Shadow of a Doubt is about a typical family whose strongest member is a teenage girl. This girl is bored with her life because she lives in a town where "nothing ever happens." This changes when her favorite uncle comes for a visit. She and this uncle share a name (Charlie) and a strong bond. The uncle is a charming, handsome man who also happens to be a serial murderer. Uncle Charlie brings with him gifts for the entire family, impending doom, a literal black cloud, which Hitchcock shows beautifully as the train pulls to a stop and thick, black smoke permeates the otherwise clear sky. Uncle Charlie also brings with him a realization that even those closest to us, those we love and admire most may be capable of very horrible things.

This film has the most mainstream plot of all those discussed here in that the subjects, as mentioned above, are in the "comfort" of home, which somehow makes the villain seem a lot more sinister and intrusive than in the other films. And he is. Hitchcock builds the suspense slowly and masterfully throughout this film by his use of camera angles, shadows and extreme close-ups, the most effective of which is the one of Uncle Charlie at the dinner table talking about the rich, fat, good-for-nothing widows he so despises. The camera pans in very slowly so that as he gets more and more disgusted we get closer and closer to this man's true nature. Chilling!

Shadow of a Doubt is also perfectly cast - Joseph Cotton (Uncle Charlie) is a great villain and encompasses many of the attributes I'd ascribe to a serial murderer (or what I've heard about them, in any case) - he's charming, attractive, worldly, and evil. Cotten also has a great, powerful voice that demands attention. When he speaks you want to believe him so it's easy to see why Charlie (the niece) so admires him. Theresa Wright is also great in her Charlie role - a worthy adversary for the evil uncle.

Other Hitchcockian filming techniques present throughout this film are the close-ups of significant objects like the step on the stairs leading to the second floor of the house, the step that Uncle Charlie has so meticulously cut through so Charlie falls and breaks her neck. We see the slow manner in which Hitchcock shows us the newspaper article Charlie is reading in the library about the Merry Widow Murderer. We learn all the facts as she does. There are plenty of the "point-of-view" shots that show us the action from the perspective of the characters in the film. Hitchcock's use of shadows in this film is particularly effective - typical (and great) noir.

The climactic scene in Shadow of a Doubt, when one Charlie tries to kill the other, is also typical Hitchcock. It takes place on a train, the intended crime is up close and personal (strangulation), and the villain's death is a fall to his death.

As for the dark humor Hitchcock rarely leaves out of his films it is done in a very enjoyable way here in the characters of the father (Henry Travers) and his friend, Herbie (Hume Cronyn).

These two friends have a most appropriate (and macabre) hobby, which is to collect and compare methods of murder. They spend the entire film trying to outwit each other in planning and executing the perfect murder but it is done so innocently that again, it becomes a great contrast to the real-life darkness that surrounds them.

A stunner! The great Notorious (1946)! There is absolutely nothing about this film not to love. The obvious is its three great stars making this the first of the films discussed that feature bonafide Hollywood superstars with all their glorious screen presence and magnificence. Claude Raines is great as Sebastian, the German agent and main villain in the story. Ingrid Bergman is Alicia, the daughter of a traitor who turns against the Germans. She marries Sebastian in order to spy on him for the U.S. Then there's Cary Grant. As Devlin, Grant plays a U.S. agent who's Alicia's contact with the agency when she is under cover. He also falls head over heals in love with her (lucky!). The scenes between Bergman and Grant need only a rolling camera to keep our attention. However, Mr. Hitchcock and his camera do a lot more here than simply roll. All their scenes together, or apart, are sublime - suspiciously so.

Hitchcock introduces the character of Devlin in this film with yet another inspired moment on film. For several minutes we see only the back of his head, there's no mistaking it's Cary Grant's head and I am tempted during these several minutes to peek around to see that face. But Hitchcock shows it to us when he is good and ready.

There is a gorgeous shot later of Devlin standing in the bedroom doorway as Alicia wakes up with a hangover. He is shown at a severe angle and from her point of view. As she turns so does our view of him until we all literally go head over heels looking at this.

This film also features what is perhaps the best example of how Hitchcock maintains the tension (visually) and how he builds the anxiety in us slowly, deliberately. For instance, throughout the entire magnificent party sequence in Sebastian's mansion the director constantly reminds us of how the champagne is running low. We see a close-up of a waiter's tray as someone picks up one of the last glasses on it, we see another man pouring the last of the champagne in one of the bottles, we see intermittent shots of both Devlin and Alicia checking the status of the champagne, and we see, again and again, shots of the table showing us the diminishing bottles. All this builds us up so that when the sequence culminates in the wine cellar we are at the edge of our seats - expecting that at any moment someone will come down and catch them. That's great stuff! And a sequence not unique to but this is my favorite (although the climactic scene in the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much is wonderful as well - same type of edit-to-repeat shots to build the suspense used in that one).

The plot in centers around espionage, suspense and romance. The writing is superb. The sets vary from Miami to Rio, from a grand mansion to a racetrack - all believable, all compelling but again, all take a back seat to how we are shown this story, rather than told. Had these people been photographed by Alfred Hitchcock throughout the entire film in a barn, I believe the impact would have been the same. Or...you get the point.

Strangers on a Train (1951) is quite scary. An eerie film. This one has some of the home town quality of Shadow of a Doubt but also includes a not-so-subtle cat and mouse game of wit and daring. The real, deep down creepiness of this movie, however, comes from the fact that it all starts with a chance meeting, which of course means it can all happen to us (an entirely different premise than we see in Shadow of a Doubt but the familiarity component is repeated). The premise is a simple, murderous quid-pro-quo - you commit my murder and I'll commit yours.

Guy Aimes (Farley Granger) and Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) casually meet on a train after one's foot brushes up against the other's. The brilliant opening sequence that leads up to this casual meeting is a montage of shots of both men's feet as they walk through the terminal and approach the train and find seats. (Did I mention it is brilliant?)

The two men start a casual conversation that ends in a deal that changes their lives forever. Bruno, whose idea it is to swap murders is a spoiled, rich, brat who also happens to be quite deranged. (It must be noted that Bruno exemplifies the Hitchcockian villain we've already seen in Shadow of a Doubt and and who we'll see again later. A villain who's very menacing and scary but who also has many sympathetic, charming qualities). After their conversation on the train about criss-crossing crimes, Bruno goes out and keeps his end of the bargain by killing Guy's wife. The scene of the murder touches upon yet another Hitchcockian element, turning a seemingly innocent place, in this case a carnival, into a dangerous, dark, murderous surrounding. And indeed, there is nothing innocent about the way Miriam's murder is shown to us, through the reflection of the murdered woman's glasses, which fall off as she is strangled. No one but Alfred Hitchcock would have done this and it is quite effective as the reflection distorts the murder from evil to macabre. Pure genius.

Bruno expects a swift and precise repayment from Guy but when Guy refuses to kill Bruno's father, Bruno haunts him. He appears everywhere and anywhere at any given moment - even sitting in the audience of a tennis match where we see a masterful shot of all the heads following the ball, left and right, left and right. All the heads that is, except Bruno's who's looking straight at Guy - in a spine-tingling shot! This is how intimately Hitchcock knew his audience. Only he would have trusted that one small head in a crowd of hundreds, filmed from afar, would affect us so deeply. By this time even we see Bruno everywhere we look!

In the end Bruno gets his when he returns to the scene of the crime to implicate Guy in his murder. From beginning to end this film is deliberate and torturous and by the time the story ends our nerves are frayed, our nails bitten. A great movie.

The masterpiece! For my money this one is it - Rear Window (1954). This film is the purest and greatest example of his gift as the visual cinematic master. I know many would disagree but I'll fight for this one. To begin with the premise of this film, voyeurism, lends itself perfectly to telling a visual story. As audience members we are voyeurs, as Stella (the great Thelma Ritter) says in the film, "a race of peeping toms," and we are watching in Rear Window a mirror image of ourselves in the character of L. B. Jefferies (Jeff, played by James Stewart). The audience is completely a part of all that happens in this film as we are complicit to all that Jeff sees. We literally see what he sees from his perspective and then we see his reaction. We see what he sees again then we get his reaction again. That is almost the entire film and the fact that it is made in such a compelling way is a cinematic wonder. A miracle.

As a result of this film's premise, Jimmy Stewart's acting in this film is almost completely shown in extremely close reaction shots. He needs ask absolutely nothing from the rest of his body. And he is wonderful. The best example of how good he is in this is in the scene when his girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) ventures into Thorwald's apartment. The sheer panic and fear on Jeff's face are palpable. Again, the classic Hitchcock film acting requirement.

The opening shot of this film is executed by way of a beautiful, slow scan across the courtyard to the windows and lives we will spend nearly two hours enthralled by. Hitchcock then pans back across to do a slow scan of Jeff himself, showing he is confined to a wheelchair, then he does a thorough run-through of Jeff's apartment whereby we learn he is a professional photographer and world traveler. Within a few minutes we have met nearly all the characters in this film and not a word has been uttered. And then there's the fact that through a window and across a courtyard, we see all stages of relationships - a lonely woman, a woman who is dating, a newly married couple, a nagging wife - it's pure genius.

When we first meet Lisa it is in a familiar way, a straight toward the camera, perspective shot as she bends down ever closer to kiss Jeff hello. You can tell Hitchcock loved the look of her and this may well be one of the most beautiful screen introductions ever done.

The central theme in this film, voyeurism, is not only dealt with on a superficial level as mentioned above where the character goes into other's lives and we go into his, by watching. Voyeurism is also judged. Is it ok to a certain point to look into other people's lives? Or do people have a right to privacy that should never be violated? Due to his physical predicament, Jeff exists to watch other's lives play out in front of his eyes and then one day he sees one across the courtyard, Ms. Lonelyhearts being manhandled and crying in despair. His reaction is to draw back immediately and to question whether what he's doing is ethical. Further then, is proving a murder worth crossing that line? Therein lies the dilemma - for him and for us. At the very end of the film when Thorwald (villain, Raymond Burr) comes in to Jeff's apartment we know he is a killer but for an instant he's the more sympathetic of the two. We know Jeff should not have been watching other people - and in fact, Jeff has nothing to say to Thorwald when he asks why he did it.

There are a number of great sub-plots in this film. One is the relationship between Jeff and Lisa and how he seems disinterested in her until she does something dangerous by going across the courtyard and into the suspected evil he's witnessed. In essence, she becomes his fantasy (although in a much more subtle way than what we later see from James Stewart in Vertigo). Then there is the importance of each little story we are privy to across that courtyard. With rarely a close-up, each is told as if it were a little film unto itself, each with humor, drama and tragedy.

Rear Window features several long, silent sequences where we get (loaded) glimpses into the lives of the people across the courtyard. We see a lot more than a glimpse of Hitchcock's wonderful use of color in the way he seems to splatter bright, primary colors into each scene, often calling our attention exactly to where he wants it. With very few exceptions the camera never leaves Jeff's apartment during this entire film. Just as Jeff is confined to a wheelchair so does Hitchcock confine himself to rather limited filming choices and the result is an astounding film. I am forever fascinated by this one.

If Rear Window is Alfred Hitchcock's visual masterpiece then Vertigo (1958) is his visual feast. Vertigo is not one of my favorites in this list of films by any means. However, there is much in this film that takes my breath away and I acknowledge it's a standout. Just not the standout for me. The story here is about a retired detective with a severe fear of heights (vertigo) whose college buddy asks him to follow his wife because he's afraid she might hurt herself. It turns out she might be possessed by a dead ancestor. The detective, Scottie (James Stewart), reluctantly agrees. Sure enough Scottie is forced to save her when she jumps into the river and he falls for her. The husband then uses Scottie's vertigo as a way to ensure he gets away with killing his wife by pushing her off a tower. However, the wife was already dead and the woman Scottie falls for is an imposter. Then comes part two. A casual meeting, or maybe not - along a city street, a lost love remembered and the obsession really begins to heat up.

From the title sequence, which features an extreme close-up of a dark, sinister eye and very creepy music I do much eye shifting myself. This film is one of the most troubling, anxiety-ridden film I've ever seen, every time I watch it. This is probably due to the fact that it goes deep in our psyche and the fact that the usually stalwart, steady, everyman, Jimmy Stewart, loses touch with reality and becomes obsessed to a degree that is very disturbing.

Until now we've seen Hitchcock visually enhance feelings of anxiety, fear, and suspicion but with this film he goes into the truly psychological world of melancholy, guilt, phobia and obsession. As always, Hitchcock is slow and deliberate in building the action here, which in this case leads to two different climaxes. His signature techniques are seen in many sequences as Scottie follows Madeleine (Kim Novak). The first time he does so there is a long, steady, visual story told, through his perspective as she goes to a church, to a courtyard, stands by the tomb of Carlotta Valdes, in her car, and to the museum where we see the hair bun and flowers Carlotta and Madeleine have in common. The entire sequence has the feel of a ballet. Vertigo also features many trick shots to illustrate the vertigo Scottie suffers from and there's even an animated sequence illustrating one of his nightmares. The extreme emotion Hitchcock intends for us to feel throughout this film is felt. And how! We've no choice in the matter.

I have to take the time to discuss another gorgeous Hitchcock blonde introduction in this film. Another by way of a steady camera and the actor moves ever-closer into an extreme close-up. This time in profile. This one has magnificent color, the actor poses deliberate in a close-up so the shot is familiar again later in the film and it all simply takes your breath away. I am referring to the first time we see Kim Novak as Madeleine. The camera follows her from afar as she walks toward us in a beautiful gown of emerald green. As she approaches the camera she stops in a complete close-up, in profile, against a bright, scarlet background. It's an absolutely gorgeous shot, which makes us understand Scottie's subsequent obsession as who wouldn't be twisted in the gut when seeing this vision (and I'm not referring to Kim Novak - just the entire picture that is set before our eyes). So deliberate and planned is this one shot that much later in the film we see Novak (as Judy) in her room - again in profile as a dark silhouette against a backdrop of emerald green, caused by a neon sign outside the window - "...cuz I remind you of her?" The obsession is now in full tilt, it's all manipulative and it's all brilliant.

I call this film a feast because it is overwhelming to the senses, a gorging. Vertigo has been called Hitchcock's most personal work. If that is really the case then genius really is a hair away from madness. I'll add that James Stewart as a sick svengali is somewhat upsetting to me. Maybe I just don't "get" this one.

North by Northwest (1959) is pure, exciting, sexy fun. It tells a typical Hitchcock story of mistaken identity and a cross-country chase. However here we have the added attraction of Cary Grant in Hitchcock's glorious color, a stupendous Eva Marie Saint as his love interest and a very "healthy" sexual chemistry between them (a nice change after Vertigo). The intrigue in this story is more confusing, at least to me, than in the other films, which makes it that much more entertaining. Just when I think I know what's going on, there's a new twist. George Kaplan, the man Thornhill (Grant) is mistaken for turns out to be a fictitious person, a decoy created by the U.S. government in order to catch the real bad guys. When we find out he's pursuing a fictitious man we also find that Eve Kendall (Saint) is in cahoots with Vandamm (James Mason) the villain. Although in reality she's an agent with the U.S. government we don't know it at this time.

There is a lot to look at in this film besides Grant and Saint. The sets are spectacular - New York's Plaza Hotel, the United Nations and of course Mt. Rushmore, in the film's very famous climax, just to name a few. There are several of the lunging-at-the-camera shots that by now are very familiar, the best being in the also quite famous crop field scene. This sequence starts off with several minutes of silence as we see a wide open, desolate field from high above and a bus driving along the road, which Thornhill eventually gets off of. The silence is deafening and goes on for quite a few minutes. The suspense builds beautifully. We wait to see who is coming to meet with Thornhill at this most unlikely meeting place. All of a sudden we hear the sounds of a crop dusting plane off the horizon. Slowly, yet suddenly (figure that one out) it becomes clear the plane is there in pursuit of Thornhill - there is no subtlety here as Hitchcock uses shots of the man and the chasing plane going straight toward the camera, which is then repeated again with a truck at the end of the sequence. Hitchcock takes his time in this scene, as he does with so many other thrilling, suspenseful moments in his films. He always opts for the drawn-out palpitation-inducing suspense over the quick jolt of an explosion. And, of course, he was the best at it. The share-crop plane sequence is also particularly memorable in that Hitchcock uses a wide, sweeping open space with no structures, which contrasts with the much more confined spaces he used in so many other films.

Beginning with Saboteur Hitchcock's name would appear above the title of all his films. That name would come to demand our attention and was enough in itself to sell movie tickets. The recognition of his signature would indeed become more famous than even those of the Hollywood stars he made huge for us up on the big screen. But the signature would be recognizable in more ways than merely by reading the name; it would be evident in every frame of every scene in every film he ever made. From the opening credits of his films through to the end he never disappears. I would say he lurks so that his presence is always felt. However, lurks seems too soft a word. The truth is he lunges - an action so often repeated in his films - and goes straight for our ocular nerve.

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This post is my contribution to the For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, hosted by the Self Styled Siren, Ferdy on Films, and This Island Rod, which raises funds for the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF). There are many bloggers from around the world participating in this event with entries featuring the work of the master, Alfred Hitchcock. You can access posts by going to any of the host pages. More importantly, you can make a donation, for any amount, by clicking on the "Donate" button that begins and ends this post, or by going to the NFPS site directly. Play your part in ensuring classic films survive for future generations.

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For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III _____________________________________________ Everyone knows that all Alfred Hitchcock films have a lot in common, all that is Alfred Hitchcock. The mark he left on each of his movies is indelible and undeniable, comparable to the mark any of history's greatest painters left on their art.

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Hitchcock on the difference between mystery & suspense: Hitchcock on suspense: Hitchcock on evoking an emotional response: Alfred Hitchcock: The Master of Suspense Considered an ‘Auteur’ - the composer (director in this case) is the primary author/creator of the text. Known for

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North by Northwest (1959) – Deep Focus ...ws, Critical Essays, and Film Analysis

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The Bizarre Process of Writing ‘North by Northwest’ | Screenwriting

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Alfred Hitchcock On Evoking An Emotional Response

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Hamlet (Act II, Scene II), Hamlet is quoted as saying: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."] The archetypal hero only finds a resolution to his disorientation and troubles by traveling from New York to Chicago by train and then flying north by Northwest (Airlines) to South Dakota and Mount Rushmore, a northwesterly trajectory.

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Techniques: Gives audience information on what is going to happen, otheriwise there would be no suspense. Needs audience to know what is going to happen because then they are not in the dark about the plot, and therefore are expecting something to happen.

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Bending Gender - Over this century, few changes have been as profound as the huge overhaul in the often confusing and always contradictory roles played ...

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The 1950s nuclear family emerged in the post WWII era, as Americans faced the imminent threat of destruction from their Cold War enemies. The ideal nuclear family turned inward, hoping to make their home front safe, even if the world was not. The image that we recall, largely as a result of the American television shows of the time period, is the picture perfect family consisting of the bread-winning, rule-making middle-class father, the doting housewife who was thrilled to wake up every single day and clean the house and cook all of the meals, and their children who never seemed to get into any sort of trouble that could not be fixed.

For those Americans who sought reassurance of the role of the family in the Cold War era, television showed them exactly that."...Television projected a vision of American life into the home that could easily be emulated, in part at least, in those places in society that already resembled the ideal..." (Gilbert 141). Though millions of Americans did not have the lifestyle depicted on the small screen, television show families from the 1950s reflected idealized gender roles of the time period, which set an aspirational norm, even if it did not reflect reality.

Past scholarship has been generally uncritical of the psychological impact of these idealized images. This paper considers recent scholarship in gender and psychology, to theorize about the ways that highly masculinized norms perpetuated by television during the 1950s may have contributed to violent development in boys and young men.

Strict Gender Roles

During the 1950s, television gender roles were stricter and more rigid than they ever had been. The men put on their business suits every morning, went to their conforming jobs, became part of the American rat race, and then were expected to come home and be a father figure and a husband. These were oftentimes the same men that had fought on battlefields of WWII or the Korean War, and now their duties had changed, so that they had to fight Communism at home by being the perfect American man. "...now it is time to raise legitimate children, and make money, and dress properly, and be kind to one's wife, and admire one's boss, and learn not to worry, and think of oneself as what? That makes no difference, he thought - I'm just a man in a gray flannel suit" (Wilson 98).

Recent scholarship in gender and psychology has addressed strict gender roles, and concluded that they influence the future behavior of children. During the 1950's, it was of the utmost importance to socialize boys strictly as boys. Through these television shows, boys were shown how "real men" were supposed to act. These shows display clear differences between men and women, with women as subordinate. For boys in the 1950s, "being a man" and never doing anything that anyone could consider feminine was a lesson taught to them by their fathers and by the popular culture of the time.

Gender Role Conflict

Researchers study the link between masculinity and violence to determine how even a non-violent show, as most shows were during the 1950s, could promote violence and the devaluation of women. Psychologist Felix Amato theorized about "Gender Role Conflict" in young males who did not grow up in violent homes and were not predisposed to an excessive amount of violence. Gender Role Conflict can be defined for these purposes as the negative consequences that occur when not adhering strictly to one's gender role. The young males in this experiment were asked to rate themselves on a Gender Role Conflict Scale from one to ten, one being the least amount of conflict and ten being the most amount of conflict.

The results of the experiment that Amato performed are discussed in his article, The Relationship of Violence to Gender Role Conflict and Conformity to Masculine Norms in a Forensic Sample, and are concluded as such: men who score higher on the Gender Role Conflict scale are more likely to be violent, and violent tendencies are more common in men who have stricter views of gender roles (Amato 190). Trying to over-fulfill one's manliness because of the fear of not being manly enough often times leads to violence.

Women as Subordinate

Boys during the 1950s were surrounded by this rigidity of manhood. This hyper-masculine mold that they were supposed to fit into consequently meant devaluing the role of women. It is possible that such television expectations contributed to the development of violent tendencies, because these boys growing up watching the men of the 1950s were not raised to value women, but rather to devalue them to make themselves seem more masculine. The repetitive exposure to these television shows, alongside with the patriarchal society that was solidified even more during the post-WWII years, created a highly constructed identity for men in America.

The television shows of the 1950s may have encouraged such violent outcomes. There was a lot of pressure on the boys to grow up as men, being ridiculed for any behavior that was not masculine and knowing that they would one day be the primary breadwinner for their family. There was also a clear gender difference growing up as boys in the 1950s, and since they were raised in a way to devalue "women's work" they did not see girls and women as important parts of society. The television shows of the 1950s may not have shown violence to boys but it shows that subordination of women and hyper-masculinity are normal, which is the exact mindset that can lead to violent tendencies.

Men of the 1950s

Through the 1950s television shows, boys were shown that to be real men, they had to follow rigid norms. These shows display clear differences between men and women, with women as subordinate. Some of the most popular television shows during the 1950s were The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and I Love Lucy. The plot lines were never dramatic and the issues were mundane. There was never any stress and problems could be fixed fairly easily. Things seemed to run smoothly in the lives of these Hollywood families, because they all had a role to play. The father was a workingman who left in the morning and came back at night, ready for his wife to serve him dinner. The fathers were not depicted as frequently as the rest of the family, because the storylines centered on the home. Since men spent the majority of their lives outside of the home, and were not involved with household chores, the dominant screen space was reserved for women and children.

In the show Leave it to Beaver, the story comes from the children's point of view and the father, Ward Cleaver, is only depicted before he leaves for work, when he comes home for dinner, or when he is solving the problems of his two sons. It is the absence of the men in the home in these television shows that reinforces that boys and men simply do not belong there. On the other hand, the mother/wife figure, who stayed at home, figured prominently. These women, such as Lucy, Harriet, and June, "Portrayed the same general character - 'a woman with a smile on her face and a trick up her sleeve, who is submissive yet controlling'" (Gilbert 138). These were the women who knew their place in the home. On the occasion that they tried to experiment with work, it was a comedic episode, because it wasn't the her "place." When young boys turned on their television sets, they would have seen the outline for what a men and women are supposed to do. It is this mindset that there is no fluidity between the two gender roles that can have negative consequences to the socialization of children.

How This Leads to Violence (Potentially)

The gender roles presented in the popular culture of the 1950s, if viewed enough by young boys, could have led to the subordination and violence against women, even in the home. While hyper-masculinity correlates with violent behaviors, there is also support for the same correlative between these rigid gender roles and violence against women, specifically. Stephanie Coontz describes the households of the 1950s in her book titled The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. She describes the rates of unhappy marriages that would likely have led to divorce, had that option been acceptable and accessible at the time, and she presents us with shocking information about abuse in 1950s households. Coontz theorizes that the pressure for perfection in the postwar home was too much pressure for each family member to handle and that this time period brought about sexual abuse, incest, alcoholism, and wife battering (Coontz 279).

Violence against women is directly connected to hyper-masculine socialization. If a man during the 1950s felt that he did not live up this "ideal" type, then this failure could have led to the use of violence toward his wife, or other women. Violence and abuse makes these men feel as though they are dominant, as their gender role prescribes that they should be. Even if this dominance is through violence, it is an act that makes the man feel "more manly" to make up for the dominance he is lacking in his life outside of the home (Pleck 4). Men who believe that the male is the more valued gender in society, and that females are subordinate, are more likely to use violence against women, not only to reassert their own dominance but because they simply do not value femininity (Hatty 69).

Works Cited

Amato, Felix J. "The Relationship Of Violence To Gender Role Conflict And Conformity To Masculine Norms In A Forensic Sample." Journal Of Men's Studies 20.3 (2012): 187-208. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 May 2013.

Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York, NY: Basic, 1992. Print.

Gilbert, James Burkhart. Men In the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2005. Print.

Hatty, Suzanne. Masculinities, Violence and Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000. Print.

McDermott, Ryon C., and Frederick G. Lopez. "College Men's Intimate Partner Violence Attitudes: Contributions Of Adult Attachment And Gender Role Stress." Journal Of Counseling Psychology 60.1 (2013): 127-136. PsycINFO. Web. 8 May 2013.

Miedzian, Myriam. Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Print.

Pleck, Joseph H. The Myth of Masculinity. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1981. Print.

Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. Print.

What do you think? .

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Masculinity, Gender Roles, and T.V. Shows from the 1950s

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The 1950s nuclear family emerged in the post WWII era, as Americans faced the imminent threat of destruction from their Cold War enemies. The ideal nuclear family turned inward, hoping to make their home front safe, even if the world was not.

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Though the 1950s was in many ways a period of conformity with traditional gender roles, it was also a decade of change, when discontent with the status quo was emerging.

Popular culture and the mass media reinforced messages about traditional gender roles, consumer culture, and the Cold War ideal of domesticity, but the reality of women's lives did not always reflect these ideals.

African American women faced particular difficulties in the pursuit of postwar material abundance and the "American dream." Popular portrayals of ideal femininity and home life ignored the lives of minority women and families.

Conformity and the 1950s

The 1950s is often viewed as a period of conformity, when both men and women observed strict gender roles and complied with society's expectations. After the devastation of the Great Depression and World War II, many Americans sought to build a peaceful and prosperous society. However, even though certain gender roles and norms were socially enforced, the 1950s was not as conformist as is sometimes portrayed, and discontent with the status quo bubbled just beneath the surface of the placid peacetime society. Although women were expected to identify primarily as wives and mothers and to eschew work outside of the home, women continued to make up a significant proportion of the postwar labor force. Moreover, the 1950s witnessed significant changes in patterns of sexual behavior, which would ultimately lead to the " sexual revolution " of the 1960s.

Changing social trends following World War II

Demobilization at the end of World War II brought a great many changes. Millions of women who had joined the workforce during the war were displaced by returning soldiers. Messages in popular culture and the mass media encouraged these women to give up their jobs and return quietly to domestic life. Most women, however, wished to keep their jobs, and thus women made up approximately one-third of the peacetime labor force.

During the 1950s, marriage and homeownership rates skyrocketed, so there is no doubt that many Americans were content to pursue the "American dream." These trends were aided by suburbanization and the mass production of automobiles. Cars allowed Americans who lived in the suburbs to commute easily into urban areas for work. Cars not only changed work and housing patterns, but also facilitated the rise of new sexual norms. They provided young couples with a place to spend time together alone, away from the prying eyes of parents and other members of the community. This, in turn, led to a rise in premarital sex and birth rates. Thus, patterns of sexual behavior were changing even as the traditional ideal continued to insist upon marriage before sex.

Between 1946 and 1964, the largest generation of Americans, known as the baby boomers, was born. This demographic trend in turn reinforced women's identities as wives and mothers. Despite societal norms that encouraged women to stay in the home and out of the workplace, approximately forty percent of women with young children, and at least half of women with older children, chose to remain in the work force.

Cold War domesticity and popular culture

Gender roles in the 1950s were intimately connected to the Cold War. The term nuclear family emerged to describe and encourage the stability of the family as the essential building block of a strong and healthy society. In this view, a woman played a crucial role in waging the Cold War, by keeping the family unit strong and intact. She could do this best, it was thought, by remaining at home to take care of her husband and children, and refusing to pursue a career. Thus was a link forged between traditional gender roles and national security.

Moreover, because the Cold War was also a competition between two very different economic systems, the virtues of capitalism were touted as proving the superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union. Capitalism revolved around the exchange of goods and services in the marketplace, and so identifying with consumer culture became a way of waging the Cold War. Women, traditionally expected to do most of the shopping for the household, were encouraged to identify as patriotic Americans by being savvy consumers.

The norms of consumer culture and domesticity were disseminated via new and popular forms of entertainment - not just the television, which became a fixture in middle-class American households during the 1950s, but also women's magazines, popular psychology, and cinema. Shows promoting the values of domesticity, like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, became especially popular. These shows portrayed the primary roles of women as wives and mothers. Lucille Ball, in I Love Lucy, inevitably met with disaster whenever she pursued job opportunities or interests that took her outside of the household. On the other hand, the fact that every episode revolved around Lucy's attempts to pursue outside interests indicated her discontent with remaining at home. Moreover, Lucille Ball, while playing the role of a hapless housewife on TV, was in reality a highly successful actress and producer, and thus challenged society's expectations of women.

African American women in the 1950s

It is important to remember that the ideal of domesticity was primarily aimed at middle-class white women. African American women, as well as women of lower socioeconomic standing, were not portrayed in popular culture as wives and mothers; in fact, these women were hardly portrayed at all. Although African Americans have been hugely influential in popular culture throughout the twentieth century, the 1950s were a very "whitewashed" decade from the standpoint of the mass media. Additionally, many African American women were forced by economic necessity to work outside of the home, and were thus excluded from the postwar ideal of domesticity.

What do you think?

Who benefited the most from the postwar surge in material abundance?

Were there signs of discontent with the status quo of the 1950s? What were they?

How did the imperatives of the Cold War shape gender roles and society's expectations of women?

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Women in the 1950s (article) | 1950s America | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Espionage is an enduring motif of the Cold War. This period is replete with stories of spies, agents and assassins, operating undercover and living double lives to infiltrate enemy governments or societies. While the extent of Cold War espionage is often exaggerated, both the United States and Soviet Union certainly spent heavily on recruiting, training and deploying spies and agents. The main purpose of Cold War espionage was to gather information and intelligence about the enemy, particularly their military and technical capabilities. This information was harvested from a range of sources, including paid informers, double-agents, stolen documents, intercepted communications, 'bugs' (listening devices) or other means of surveillance. Agents also carried out disruptive missions, such as carrying out sabotage operations and kidnapping or assassinating enemy agents or politicians. Cold War spies were rarely flamboyant James Bond types portrayed in literature and film. The success of their missions - and indeed their survival - usually hinged on looking and behaving like ordinary members of society.

All major Cold War powers maintained at least one government agency dedicated to intelligence-gathering and espionage. In the United States, this task fell to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA began as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a military branch that conducted espionage and undercover operations during World War II. In 1947 the OSS was reorganised and rebranded as the CIA. The CIA's structure, mission and methods were shaped by the Cold War. One early directive (1948) authorised the CIA to conduct secret operations "against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups" so that "US government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorised persons". The CIA was also supported by other US government agencies. Formed in 1952, the National Security Agency (NSA) gathered information by monitoring, intercepting and decoding signals and radio traffic. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI, formed 1908) was responsible for investigating domestic criminal activity, which included espionage, sedition and other treasonable activities.

The CIA's Cold War activities ranged from general surveillance of suspected foreign agents, to deploying its own agents abroad, to illicit operations like assassinations and human experimentation. The CIA also complemented US foreign policy by supporting, funding and equipping anti-communist leaders and groups abroad. One of the CIA's first major missions, for example, was to assist non-communist political parties in Italy in 1948. Several Cold War coups and attempted coups, such as the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, were conducted with the backing or active involvement of the CIA. In 1959-61, CIA agents recruited and trained 1,500 Cuban exiles. In April 1961 these Cubans landed the island-state with plans to overthrow Fidel Castro, an incident dubbed the Bay of Pigs Invasion. CIA pilots flew U-2 flights over Soviet and Cuban territory, collecting data about military facilities, armaments and troop movements. The CIA also plotted assassination attempts on foreign leaders, such as Castro. In 1974 the CIA spent more than $US800 million on Project Azorian, a mission to recover codebooks and nuclear technology from a sunken Soviet sub, laying under 16,000 feet of water in the Pacific Ocean.

Sometimes operating jointly with the Department of Defence, the CIA also carried out research into nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the effects they had on humans. They also researched effective interrogation techniques and mind control strategies. One of these research programs was Project MK-ULTRA, which ran from 1953 to the late 1960s and soaked up more than $US10 million in funding. MK-ULTRA was chiefly concerned with the effects of hypnosis and mind-altering drugs, with a view to using them for Cold War purposes. Many questions have been raised about MK-ULTRA and the unethical nature of its research. Hundreds of Americans, mostly military personnel, were subjected to drug trials and experimentation without their informed consent. MK-ULTRA experiments are believed to have contributed to several deaths, including Harold Blauer and Frank Olson, who died in 1953 after being injected with hallucinogenic drugs. Other secret programs conducted by the CIA included Operation Mockingbird (aimed at facilitating sympathetic media coverage), Project Resistance (information-gathering about radical student groups) and Operation Chaos (the disruption of American left-wing and anti-war groups). One CIA project, Stargate, even investigated psychic abilities and their possible use in intelligence applications.

United States law prohibited the CIA from carrying out domestic operations (a restriction that was often breached during the Cold War). Within US borders, the investigation and prosecution of suspected spies was the responsibility of the FBI. Between 1935 and 1972 the FBI was headed by J. Edgar Hoover, a fanatical anti-communist and a ruthless political operator. The FBI began investigating Soviet espionage in 1943 after receiving an anonymous letter. Within two years, the FBI had more than doubled in size, numbering around 13,000 agents. In late 1945 the FBI was provided with extensive information about Soviet espionage by Elizabeth Bentley, who herself had been passing information to Moscow. Bentley provided the FBI with a 112-page confession, naming 80 people as paid informers or agents working for Moscow. Bentley's defection, along with accusations against State Department lawyer Alger Hiss, fuelled anti-communist hysteria in America during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1956 Hoover authorised COINTELPRO (short for Counter-Intelligence Program), a prolonged campaign targeting domestic political organisations. For 15 years, FBI agents infiltrated a range of organisations including left-wing political parties, unions, civil rights groups, radical student associations, the anti-war movement, regional militias and race-hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. These agents fed information back to the FBI - and occasionally took action to disrupt these groups from within.

The Soviet Union had a much longer history of espionage and intelligence-gathering. Russian secret police organisations dated back to the Okhrana in the late 1800s, the communist CHEKA (1917-22), the OGPU (1922-34) and Stalin's NKVD (1934-54). All used covert methods to gather information about political dissidents and potential 'enemies of the state'. After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the NKVD was replaced by the KGB ( Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or 'Committee for National Security'). The KGB assumed responsibility for both domestic security and foreign intelligence. Another department called Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye (GRU) gathered intelligence for the Soviet military. Decades of experience in espionage, along with existing agents and contacts in Western countries, gave the Soviet Union a distinct 'head start' in this area. The Soviets began mobilising agents and recruiting informers in Western countries during the 1930s. During World War II, Moscow prioritised the infiltration of the Manhattan Project, America's nuclear weapons research program. Soviet agents were able to obtain and pass on technical information about this program, including blueprints, with remarkable ease. By the time the US dropped its first atomic bomb on Japan in August 1945, Stalin knew more about this devastating new weapon than most American politicians.

A historian's view:
"The issue of Soviet espionage became a US obsession, and domestic security dominated public discourse. Legislative committees vied with one another to expose communists. The executive branch laboured to root out disloyal government employees. The courts wrestled with the balance between constitutional rights and societal self-protection... There was a widespread consensus that Soviet espionage was a serious problem, that American communists assisted the Soviets, and some high officials had betrayed the United States."
John Earl Haynes, historian

The passing of American nuclear secrets led to probably the best-known spy case of the Cold War. As mentioned above, FBI investigations in the late 1940s uncovered a chain of Soviet spies and paid informers operating inside America's borders. By 1950 the FBI was investigating Julius Rosenberg, a civilian engineer previously employed by the US Army. Rosenberg, who had ties with an American communist group, was arrested in 1950 and accused of passing information to a Russian agent. When he refused to confess or provide investigators with more names, the FBI began targeting his wife Ethel. Both were eventually charged under the Espionage Act. Put on trial, they denied the charges and refused to testify or name associates. In April 1951 the Rosenbergs were found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair. This verdict caused outrage and disbelief both in America and internationally. Many thought the Rosenbergs were innocent; others believed they were nothing more than go-betweens and therefore undeserving of the death penalty. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted in New York in June 1953. They were the only Americans executed for espionage during the Cold War.

The United States was not the only Cold War nation to suffer infiltration by Soviet agents. Britain was also subject to Soviet espionage, most notably by the Cambridge Five spy ring. In 1963 British journalist Kim Philby disappeared from Lebanon. Until his resignation in 1951, Philby had been a high-ranking member of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (or MI6). In reality, Philby was a double-agent and had been passing information to Moscow since the mid-1930s. Philby and two of his fellow agents, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, defected to the USSR and lived there until their deaths. The British government was further damaged in 1963 when it was revealed that Donald Profumo, a member of the Cabinet, was sharing a mistress with a known Soviet spy. In 1954 Vladimir Petrov, a Soviet diplomat and KGB colonel, defected to Australia. Petrov provided the government there with information about Soviet spies operating in Australia. The Petrov affair led to the USSR and Australia severing diplomatic ties for five years.

1. Espionage is the process of gathering intelligence and information about a rival or enemy, usually through secret operations. It was a significant feature of the Cold War.

2. All major Cold War powers had agencies that engaged in espionage. These agencies collected intel, assisted anti-communists, targeted enemies and researched new weapons and techniques.

3. The CIA, an American agency formed in 1947, was tasked with intelligence-gathering and, later, carrying out covert operations. It was supported by agencies like the NSA and FBI.

4. The Soviets had a much longer history of espionage in Western nations, dating back to before World War II. They recruited and used agents to obtain American nuclear secrets.

5. Espionage and spies became an enduring motif of the Cold War. There were many incidents and accusations involving espionage, including the execution of the Rosenbergs, the capture Gary Powers and his U2 spyplane and the Petrov affair in Australia.

The CIA is authorised to carry out covert operations (June 1948)
The Church Committee condemns domestic intelligence-gathering on US citizens (1976)

Citation information
Title: "Cold War espionage"
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/espionage/
Date published: September 22, 2018
Date accessed: January 29, 2020
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

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Espionage is an enduring motif of the Cold War. This period is replete with stories of spies, agents and assassins, operating undercover and living double lives to infiltrate enemy governments or societies. While the extent of Cold War espionage is often exaggerated, both the United States and Soviet Union certainly spent heavily on recruiting, training and deploying spies and agents.

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To what extent did the Cold War shape the American domestic life of the 1950s?

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Immediately after World War II, life for most Americans in the United States was as good as it had ever been: the middle class rapidly expanded, unemployment wa

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Selling Ideologies - Cold War Propaganda

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In this program, we encounter the ultimate weapons wielded in the Cold War - propaganda and disinformation. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet ...

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Containment

By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called "containment." In his famous "Long Telegram," the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained the policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was "a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree]." As a result, America's only choice was the "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

"It must be the policy of the United States," he declared before Congress in 1947, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation...by outside pressures." This way of thinking would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades.

Did you know? The term 'cold war' first appeared in a 1945 essay by the English writer George Orwell called 'You and the Atomic Bomb.'

The Cold War: The Atomic Age

The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States. In 1950, a National Security Council Report known as NSC-68 had echoed Truman's recommendation that the country use military force to contain communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defense spending.

In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. Thus began a deadly " arms race." In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or "superbomb." Stalin followed suit.

As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed radioactive waste into the atmosphere.

The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans' everyday lives.

The Cold War and the Space Race

Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for "traveling companion"), the world's first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth's orbit. Sputnik's launch came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to most Americans.

In the United States, space was seen as the next frontier, a logical extension of the grand American tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile-seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space-made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.

In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.

That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) made the bold public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA's Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans.

U.S. astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

The Cold War and the Red Scare

Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC) brought the Cold War home in another way. The committee began a series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.

In Hollywood, HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these "blacklisted" writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade. HUAC also accused State Department workers of engaging in subversive activities. Soon, other anticommunist politicians, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), expanded this probe to include anyone who worked in the federal government.

Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and "loyalty oaths" became commonplace.

The Cold War Abroad

The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad. In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People's Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option. Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.

In 1955, the United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made West Germany a member of NATO and permitted it to remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria that set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union.

Other international disputes followed. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial "Third World."

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully "contain" communist expansionism there, they would have to intervene more actively on Diem's behalf. However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year conflict.

The End of the Cold War and Effects

Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began to implement a new approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, "bi-polar" place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

At the same time, he adopted a policy of "détente"-"relaxation"-toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.

Despite Nixon's efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.

Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. In response to severe economic problems and growing political ferment in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia's relationship to the rest of the world: "glasnost," or political openness, and " perestroika," or economic reform.

Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall-the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War-was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.

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Cold War: Summary, Combatants, Start & End

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The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted for decades and resulted in anti-communist suspicions and international incidents that led the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear disaster.

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Fig. 3 - ...and combine both images in the lab.

To simplify, matte photography, or matting, combines a real scene shot on a real location or a set, with fictional elements. Usually the fictional part of the image is what is known as a matte painting; it's photo-realistic. The process of matting begins with shooting a scene like Cary Grant walking on a real road. In the lab, part of the image is removed, leaving a blank space (Fig. 1). A matte painting is prepared; it contains the rest of the desired image, such as Vandamm's house in the background (Fig. 2). The matte painting has a blank area where the "real" image is to go. Film lab techniques combine the two images, and the illusion of Cary Grant walking toward a Frank Lloyd Wright house is complete (Fig. 3). Mattes are difficult to do, because so much depends on the quality of the painting and the precision of the match between real and painted areas. If you'll look closely, Fig. 2 looks much less "real" by itself than it does on the screen; the reality of the foreground fools the eye into accepting the fake background.
Author's Note: The images shown here are not the original matte elements used in "North by Northwest"; those elements may not even exist any more, because MGM broke up and sold off all its physical properties beginning in 1969. These images are digital approximations of what those original elements probably looked like.
The simple answers are no place, no, no, no, and no, but there's much more to it than that. The house in "North by Northwest" has a history just as fascinating as any "real" dwelling ever built, as you're about to find out.

The simple truth about the Vandamm house is that it was not a real structure, and that it was not designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was designed by MGM set designers for some very specific reasons; some of the reasons had to do with the movie's plot, some were based in the mechanics of movie-making, and not a few were because Alfred Hitchcock had a point to make.

To understand how the Vandamm house came into "existence", you have to understand the main point of "North by Northwest". The complexities of the famous plot aside, it is about a man who is surrounded by the trappings of wealth, power and prestige- none of which are of any use to him whatever in his incredible adventure. "North by Northwest's" hero, Roger Thornhill, is a Madison Avenue ad man who is abducted when he is mistaken for a spy. He's kidnapped from the least likely place on the planet- right out from under the Everett Shinn murals in the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel. Having made the point that even the safety of the most famous hotel in New York was useless to his film's hero, Hitchcock went on to surround Roger Thornhill with example after example of late-1950's luxury, and kept hammering the point that none of it did Thornhill any good. The assassins take Thornhill to the Phipps Estate on Long Island in a Cadillac limousine. He's nearly killed later in a Mercedes roadster. He escapes back to the Plaza, then to the new United Nations Building. His adventures take him to Chicago via the Twentieth Century Limited, where he meets a female spy who possesses a Bergdorf Goodman wardrobe, a ruby necklace from Van Cleef & Arpels, and a new 1958 Lincoln Continental Mark III convertible. From there, Thornhill's adventures culminate in a visit to Mount Rushmore, where he finds the mastermind behind the assassins in a luxurious Modernist eyrie built almost on top of the monument.

Hitchcock had two basic reasons for all this luxe. First was the movie's theme of isolation amidst luxury, of course. But there was another reason: "North by Northwest" was designed from its inception as a very, very commercial movie. Hitchcock knew the mass audience responded very well to being shown things and places they couldn't really afford, as long as they were presented in a way that paid that audience the compliment of saying, "of course, you know all about this."

This presented a challenge for Hitchcock- one that, by all accounts, he had a great deal of fun meeting. He was faced with having to find places and things that were universally recognized as belonging to the rich and powerful; that mass audience being targeted by MGM could not be relied on to get the point of discreet luxury. For Hitchcock, this meant pleasurable tasks like personally selecting Eva Marie Saint's wardrobe at Bergdorf's- and making sure a Bergdorf label showed in one shot. It meant getting the cooperation of the Plaza and the equally famous Ambassador East in Chicago. And it meant coming up with a house for Vandamm.

Almost alone among the trappings chosen for "North by Northwest", the Vandamm house was a problem- or, rather, multiple problems. First was that it had to fulfill the recognition requirement; the house had to reek of sophistication and luxury. Second, it almost had to be a Modernist house; the rocky hills of South Dakota didn't lend themselves to traditional architecture. And third, it had to be a Modernist house that was obviously in the same class of expensive good taste as the Plaza and the ruby necklace and the Lincoln and the Twentieth Century Limited. Hitchcock knew that there was only one way to fill these requirements- a Frank Lloyd Wright house. He ran into trouble almost immediately.

Mass-market magazines like House Beautiful kept Frank Lloyd Wright in the public eye with all-Wright issues; there was one in 1955 and this one done in 1959 as a tribute after Wright's death.

In 1958, when "North by Northwest" was in production, Frank Lloyd Wright was the most famous Modernist architect in the world. His magnum opus, "Fallingwater", was conceivably the most famous house anywhere. His renown in the Fifties was such that mass-market magazines like House Beautiful and House & Garden devoted entire issues to his work. If Hitchcock could put a Wright house in his movie, that mass audience was going to get the point right away. Wright was absolutely the man to fill the bill Hitchcock needed filled, but there were some snags along the way.

The biggest was that Frank Lloyd Wright was expensive, even by Hollywood standards. Wright had been approached by Warner Bros. in 1949, for "The Fountainhead"; the story of a Modernist architect cried out for Wright-designed sets. Wright was perfectly agreeable to doing the job, but talks broke down when he set his fee. He asked for a fee of ten percent- the standard architect's fee he asked for any design. The Warners' people told him that a fee of ten percent of the set budget was high by their standards, but that they'd meet it- whereupon Wright coolly informed them that he'd meant ten percent of the movie's budget. End of discussions. "The Fountainhead" ended up with sets by Edwin Carrere, and Wright never designed for any Hollywood movie.

Taking a page from Warners' book, Hitchcock seized upon the idea of having MGM staff design a house in Wright's manner. It was a sensible idea; Wright used materials and themes in his designs that could be conveniently appropriated. All those magazine articles had already conditioned the audience to know that those materials and themes meant "Frank Lloyd Wright" and nobody else. Hitchcock would get the look and the recognition- without the expense.

Designing the house was one thing; building it would be quite another. Despite the plausibility of "North by Northwest's" plot, its final sequences atop Mount Rushmore contained a major untruth. Far from being an area where a spy could build a mountaintop mansion, the top of the monument was considered so ecologically fragile that MGM researchers had to have special permits and U.S. Park Service escorts to visit. Building anything up there was absolutely out of the question. The research team photographed and measured, and came back with a plan.

The house would be created entirely in Culver City, where MGM was located. It would consist of a few sections built at full-scale, as movie sets. The exterior shots would depend on special effects. Certain shots would blend the sets together with the special effects, to create the illusion that the house was real.

The set designers on "North by Northwest" were Robert Boyle, William A. Horning, Merrill Pye, Henry Grace, and Frank McKelvey. It has not been possible to sort out exactly which of these men was responsible for the house design, but whoever did it did his homework. The final design was of a hilltop house of limestone dressed and laid in the manner made famous by Wright, along with a concrete cantilever under the living room area. The house was correctly situated just under the top of its hill; Wright was famous for saying, " of the hill, not on top of the hill." The house's massing- heavy with limestone in the rear where the house met the hillside, light with glass and concrete at the free end of the cantilever- was also correctly Wrightian. To the knowing, the design contained one element that would not have been used by Wright; there were steel beams supporting the cantilever. Wright would almost certainly have come up with an unsupported cantilever, as he did at "Fallingwater", but very few viewers would know that. It is also possible that the mass audience requirements for "North by Northwest" dictated the use of the beams; Hitchcock may have felt that a true Wright cantilever would distract audiences from the plot, making them wonder what on earth was holding the house up, instead of focusing on the action. In the event, the beams also served the plot by giving Cary Grant a way to climb into the house.

The portions of the house that were actually built were the living room, part of the bedroom wing, the carport, and a bit of hillside under the living room where the cantilever beams were. Most of the construction was of interiors only, but certain areas like the outside of the bedroom wing had their exteriors finished, so that they could be shot from inside looking out, or outside looking in. The interiors were masterpieces of deception: nearly nothing was what it appeared. The limestone walls were mostly plaster, real limestone was used in a few places where the camera would be very close. The expanses of window were mostly without glass; glass reflects camera crews and lights. For a few shots where reflections were needed, and could be controlled, glass was used in some places. And in the best tradition of movie-set building, some of the walls were "breakaways"- walls that looked perfectly real and solid, but were capable of being unbolted and taken away to accommodate the bulky VistaVision ® cameras used in 1958. An enormous black velvet cyclorama surrounded the sets, to give the illusion of a deep South Dakota night. All the house sequences were deliberately done as nighttime ones, because the special effects needed to create the house's exteriors would be best concealed that way.

The luxurious Modernism of the house extended to its furnishings.
The living room set was dressed in the best of 1958's furniture and art, and it makes a very interesting point. The furniture is largely Scandinavian Modern. There is Chinese art, and a Pre-Colombian statue figures prominently in the action. Greek flokati rugs are on the floors. Vandamm's spying is meant to set the nations of the world at war, but it seems they co-exist peacefully enough under his roof!

The exterior sequences were done using a pre-digital technique called 'matting'. In matte photography, a real location or set is combined with a painting; the real portion is then made to appear part of a larger area that does not actually exist. A very famous example is when Dorothy and her friends run toward the Emerald City in "The Wizard of Oz". The foreground with the actors and the deadly field of poppies is a set; the background is a painting. (See the sidebar article below for pictures and a simplified explanation of matting.)

And there it is- the truth about the Vandamm House. It's not real, and it never was. It's imagination and technology and our dreams, all wrapped up together. It's exactly where we wanted a Hitchcock villain to live. And if it never existed in Rapid City, South Dakota, it is real where it counts- in the minds of the millions who have seen it, and loved it, and coveted it for their own.

And I like to think that Frank Lloyd Wright deserves at least part of the credit for that.

Reel and Unreal: Matte Photography for the Novice

It's an old story; a film script contains a scene that cannot possibly be filmed as written. Maybe it's impossible to get permission to film where the scene is to take place, or maybe the place does not exist. Today, CG (computer-generated) effects can solve the problem, showing us everything from Roman arenas in "Gladiator" to dinosaurs in the "Jurassic Park" movies. In the old days, they did it with a process called matte photography.

Fig.1 - First, you film Cary Grant walking along a real road somewhere

Fig. 2 - ...then you paint the rest of the scene

Fig. 3 - ...and combine both images in the lab.

To simplify, matte photography, or matting, combines a real scene shot on a real location or a set, with fictional elements. Usually the fictional part of the image is what is known as a matte painting; it's photo-realistic. The process of matting begins with shooting a scene like Cary Grant walking on a real road. In the lab, part of the image is removed, leaving a blank space (Fig. 1). A matte painting is prepared; it contains the rest of the desired image, such as Vandamm's house in the background (Fig. 2). The matte painting has a blank area where the "real" image is to go. Film lab techniques combine the two images, and the illusion of Cary Grant walking toward a Frank Lloyd Wright house is complete (Fig. 3). Mattes are difficult to do, because so much depends on the quality of the painting and the precision of the match between real and painted areas. If you'll look closely, Fig. 2 looks much less "real" by itself than it does on the screen; the reality of the foreground fools the eye into accepting the fake background.
Author's Note: The images shown here are not the original matte elements used in "North by Northwest"; those elements may not even exist any more, because MGM broke up and sold off all its physical properties beginning in 1969. These images are digital approximations of what those original elements probably looked like.
This article was originally posted on June 5th, 2001. Republished March 19, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Copyright (c) 2001, 2015, D.A. "Sandy" McLendon and Joe Kunkel, Jetset - Designs for Modern Living. All Rights Reserved.

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Modernism at the Movies: North by Northwest

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How Alfred Hitchcock and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put a Frank Lloyd Wright house on top of Mount Rushmore in spite of common sense, Frank Lloyd Wright and the United States Government. Sort of. I guess it's only natural. Since I'm known as a modernism buff, Frank Lloyd Wright fan, mov

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Farce and context in Hitchcock’s  North by Northwest2019