North by Northwest and the "Action Beats" of 1959

Somewhere in the 80's, some action movie producer(Joel Silver, maybe) connected to Lethal Weapon and Die Hard and the like, coined the phrase "action beats" as a means of saying that a movie should have action "every seven minutes." Action beats had been appearing since at least Raiders of the Lost Ark. Star Wars seemed to need about an hour of drama before exploding into a series of action beats in the final hour.

Meanwhile, way back in 1959, Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest(NXNW) was considered a "big action movie" - a chase thriller, really.

How many action beats are there in NXNW? Three. Three, in a 2 hour, 16 minute movie.

1959 audiences felt that was a TON of action.

The three action beats are:

ONE: Cary forcibly intoxicated and set to drive on a Cliffside road.

TWO: Crop-duster attack on Cary..

THREE: Mount Rushmore cliffhanger chase for Cary and Eva Marie Saint, together.

...and they were pretty "evenly spaced," all things considered.

The drunken car drive is early on, sets the pace for the chase to follow -- and its the first actual attempt by the bad guys(a Commie spy ring) to kill Cary.

The crop duster attack -- with Cary's great run from the giant bird swooping down behind him - comes about halfway through the movie, mid-point, and rather divides the movie into two parts, right there.

The Mount Rushmore climax. The second part (which includes the Third Act) leads up to this big, big, big climax. Its important that the lovely Eva Marie must experience this life-or-death confrontation by Cary's side...they will clinch their marital future here on survival. ("If we ever get out of this , let's take the train together back to New York" "Is that a proposition?" "It's a proposal, sweetie.")

Modern young audiences are going to have trouble, I suppose , with the paucity of "action beats" in NXNW, but they reflect a different kind of narrative filmmaking from the past , which worked very well, and in a different way, than today's "instant gratification."

It worked like this: after a first half hour or so of establishing the lead(Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill) and establishing his suspenseful, harrowing situation(the bad guys think he is spy George Kaplan, and all they want to do now is to kill him)..we get the first attempt TO kill him. The car scene is pretty good, with the early cliffhanger stuff and then the curving road and "double vision" of a drunken man trying to control his car.

Indeed, the car scene is good enough for NXNW to go on for about another 45 minutes without any action at all. But that's not to say there isn't suspense and fun and a great Hitchcockian set-piece(the murder at the UN.) And then the movie brings Eve Kendall in (at about the 52 minute mark! Eva Marie Saint was concerned by this when she got the script) and we get some sexy banter and sexier necking before matters finally head for big action: the crop duster scene.

The way things worked back then, a certain suspense built up to wait for the next action scene(more than a half hour if necessary) and then to delight in that scene when it finally came. So it was with the crop duster scene, which one critic said(for the time) "was exciting enough that it could climax a usual movie.."

With the crop duster scene brought to explosive climax(bad guys dead) the movie takes Thornhill on to Chicago and another Htichcock setpiece(the auction scene -- life-or-death suspense mixed with screwball comedy) and then on to Rapid City South Dakota and Mount Rushmore for some extended hijincks(the fake shooting of Grant) before settling in for a climax that brings everybody together in a mix of life or death and romantic fulfillment.

Three action beats was all we/they needed in 1959. The waits in between were exquisitely suspenseful. The scenes in between were massively entertaining.

The movie was a classic.