MovieChat Forums > North by Northwest (1959) Discussion > It All Points to Mount Rushmore

It All Points to Mount Rushmore

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Hitchcock made a suave and colorful "small thriller" in 1955 with Cary Grant called "To Catch a Thief." For what it is -- glamourous(gorgeous Grace Kelly is gorgeous Grant's co-star), colorful(Oscar winning color cinematography of the French Riviera by night and day), and sophisticated(the dialogue)...it isn't much of a thriller, action or otherwise. There is some nice cliffhanging at the end(Cary literally has the upper hand against the villain) and a nice process shot car chase in the middle but...it is really a quiet , small non-thrilling thriller.

Not so, North by Northwest. Four years down the line at the very end of the fifties, with two masterful dramatic near flops just released(The Wrong Man and Vertigo), Hitchcock sensed that it was time to "turn up the volume" and make a thriller that really THRILLED. This would have not one, not two, but THREE action set-pieces(that's not so many as today but back then that was a lot) and the sense of a chase across much of America(well, two thirds maybe.) Just as Psycho would, one film later, "set the table" for shocks and slashing in thrillers(adding horror to the mix) North by Northwest rejected the sedate minor key mini-thrills of To Catch a Thief with something bigger, stronger, faster...better.

The opening action sequence is pretty good. The baddies have filled Cary Grant full of bourbon and put him behind the wheel of a Mercedes. They wish for him to drive off a cliff to his doom. But instead he crawls the car to the edge of the cliff, looks down at the crashing seas and rocks below him, and drunkenly steers the car on a "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" down a curving road(mountainous is wrong for Long Island but...whatever.)

That's the first set piece in NXNW, near the beginning. The next set piece comes about midway through the film: the famous crop duster sequence in which about seven minutes of "nothing happening" (Cary waits by the side of an empty road in the middle of vast and empty prarie fields) gives way to about six minutes of exhilarating airplane dives at our hero and athlete runs by the hero, all ending with an explosive bang when a gas tanker truck meets the crop duster.

The "crop duster scene" seems to be the "artistic favorite" of critics who write on North by Northwest." Its absurdist construction. Its careful pacing and gradual acceleration into action. Its humor. Its great wide open spaces("Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.") Its explosive finale(100 explosion-based thrillers start HERE.)

But Hitchcock has one more big set-piece up his sleeve. He saves it for the very end, and it can be said that the entire movie builds up to it. Cary had to survive the murder attempts via drunk driving and crop duster "all by his lonesome." He is given a companion for his final confronation with death: Eve Kendall, a woman he met two days earlier who he now realizes will be the love of his twice-divorced life, as long as he and she can survive being chased to and cornered upon: Mount Rushmore.

Hitchcock had wanted to stage a climax on Mount Rushmore for years, and likely realized he would only get it into a movie if an original screenplay could be written to get the story to go there. A chase across Mount Rushmore wasn't something that a spy novel would contemplate. It was a fantasy. Hitchcock said that the entirety of North by Northwest was a fantasy -- the crop duster attack is rather fanciful, yes? -- but the BIGGEST fantasy was to stage the climax on Mount Rushmore.

The predecessor in Hitchcock climaxes to this one, of course, was his Statue of Liberty climax in Saboteur(1942), But that statue didn't have much space for chasing on it. And Hitch elected to stage that climax not only with no music at all, but almost with no dialogue at all. It is a "silent sequence" accompanied only by the wind and a distant tug boat honk as the villain(not the hero) dangles from the outstretched hand of Lady Liberty and the hero tries to save him ...but alas, the villain is hanging by a thread and falls to his special effects death.

Hitchcock seems to have known that Mount Rushmore --a mountain , not a statue, consisting of four gigantic heads of four US Presidents -- would afford him much more room for action -- and much more need for some exciting, exhilarating, thunderous music (courtesy of Bernard Herrmann) to capture the chase.

Hitchcock said somewhere that "the Mount Rushmore sequence is the only reason I made the movie." He also said this about the shower scene in Psycho and the office rape-murder scene in Frenzy. Certainly the first two were classic for all time and the third ended up the most disturbing Hitchocck scene put on film.

But Mount Rushmore is the funnest.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The narrative climax is great: Grant will now confront spymaster James Mason's murderous henchmen one more time in final life-or-death showdown. Grant will now win the hand of the best woman he's ever met in his life -- if he can save her life. In a quiet "breather" while hiding from the baddies, Grant bids for Wife Number Three

Grant: If we get out of this alive, let's go home to New York on the train together.
Saint: Is that a proposition?
Grant: Its a proposal, sweetheart.

..and it is deeply moving how love factors into the possibility of death as well as a reflection on just how great this climax is:

Saint: What happened to the other marriages?
Grant: My wives divorced me.
Saint: Why?
Grant: I think they said I led too dull a life.

Ha. Well, he ain't living too dull a life NOW. This is just about the most exciting and cosmic climax to ANY thriller up until this point in movie history. (Just as the shower murder one film later will the most shocking and scream inducing murder in any thriller up until this point in movie history.)

Just as the narrative is so wonderfully put together to climax at this point -- its the ultimate "Get them!" chase scen in movies -- the powerful, gigantic visuals pay off as in no movie ever before, or in certain ways, since. From the first spectacular shot of the Presidential heads from BEHIND...just the tops of the backs of their heads, looking out on the moonlight mountains and valleys beneath them -- this sequence is "eye candy" of a different sort. A chase in the Land of the Giants, with the special effects well night perfect for 1959 -- it really looks like those people are all really up there on Mount Rushmore, at night when things are REALLY cool to look at. There are no tourists down below -- its just the Presidents, our heroes , and the villains.

[–] Owlwise (1536) 4 years ago

Your wonderful posts make me want to see this film again, and soon!

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Thank you very much. Believe me, this ending alone deserves to be seen, again and again.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The two surviving henchmen sent by James Mason to capture Grant and Saint use a "pincer movement" to corner the couple. Valerian the Knifeman climbs down screen left -- under Washington's jowls -- while Leonard the Gay Advisor climbs down screen right, working his way under Lincoln's beard.

Though there was thrilling music from the moment Grant and Saint started running onto the monument ("What do we do?" "Climb down, we have no choice") , at a certain point, in returns Bernard Herrmann's thrilling fandango of a credits sequence score -- it happens on a side shot of Valerian starting to lower himself alongside Washington's cheek.

Someone wrote that Hitchcock "knew that movies were meant to be looked at" and we LOOK AT all these great shots , from different angles, of people scrambling around the Rushmore giant heads. The best bit for my money are two combined shots that show Leonard(Martin Landau) losing his grip alongside Lincoln's head and falling about 30 yards below to an outcropping that saves his life even as it bangs him up pretty good (good...he's bad.)

The government refused to let Hitchcock film the characters actually hanging from the Presidential faces(or sneezing in Lincoln's nose), so the final action moves to a Cliffside that frankly could be "any cliff, anywhere" -- except we know it is at Rushmore so we SEE Rushmore anyway(in our mind's eye, nearby).

Classic final footage: Valerian the knifeman leaps onto Grant and they roll down a dangerous cliff-hill to near death. Grant grips Valerian's knife hand by the wrist. Valeian's knife gleams in the light -- as Mrs. Bates knife will gleam upon attacked Arbogast the Detective in Psycho. Grant manages to push Valerian free, using the man's own weight against him and forcing the killer to plummet to his special effects POV death(ala Saboteur.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Next up, Leonard, who is struggling with Saint over a small statue(a "practical McGuffin" -- not only does it contain spy microfilm, because Grant and Saint have possession of it, the bad guys can't simply shoot Grant and Saint off the mountain. They have to go in there and "get that figure back"(Vandamm's specific order.)

Leonard pushes Saint(Eve) down the Cliffside. She is hanging by one hand and Grant grabs it. Grant's other hand holds himself in place (unlike in Saboteur, BOTH the hero and heroine are hanging and at risk here.) Grant asks -- futilely I suppose -- Leonard to "help me." But Leonard instead grinds his shoe down on Grant's hand.

Screenwriter William Goldman praised NXNW screenwriter Ernest Lehman for resolving about 10 plot points in 27 seconds:

Grant and Saint are saved.
Leonard is killed (shot by a parks ranger on orders of the CIA.)
Spymaster Mason is captured (surrounded by the CIA and the ranger, saying "that wasn't very sporting, using real bullets.")
The microfilm is saved(close up on the statue shattering -- it doesn't go over the side.)
Grant and Saint(Roger and Eve) indeed take that train together to New York(cut to: Grant pulling Saint up from the Rushmore cliff and into the train sleeping berth.)
Roger and Eve get married. "Come on Mrs. Thornhill," says Grant.

and the phallic train enters the tunnel and Herrmann's score comes to a thunderous concert conclusion(many movies did this to 'fake" excitement, but here it is EARNED) and...

...we have just completed the greatest set-piece in Hitchcock(IMHO) and a climax that no movie since has ever really been able to duplicate.

Because after you've climaxed on Mount Rushmore, where else can you go?

The Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower are too restrictive of movement(though they were both used in movies, several times.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Meanwhile as summer blockbuster movies backed themselves into a corner for climaxes, we had such spectacles as Spider-Man II (of 2004) and Batman Begins(of 2005) BOTH featuring climaxes(or set-pieces) on elevated trains. Batman (1989) had a climax in a bell tower that looked like Vertigo on steroids, and Die Hard could only stage ITS cliffhanger out a skyscraper window.

No...the Mount Rushmore chase in North by Northwest has never been equaled. Hitchcock couldn't equal it and so none of his seven movies after NXNW had a climax to beat it -- though Psycho had a more SCARY climax in a small fruit cellar. His spy movies Torn Curtain and Topaz were so bereft of action to be disappointing on their own terms, but doubly so against North by Northwest. And when NXNW screenwriter Ernest Lehman returned one more time to write Hitchcock's final film Family Plot, the best the two men could offer was retread of the drunk driving scene in NXNW(better than the one in NXNW, I would say, but there was nothing else action-wise in Family Plot.)

Movie history would seem to offer us up the shower murder as the most famous scene in Hitchcock, and it is. Possibly the most famous scene in ANY movie.

But my favorite Hitchcock set-piece is the Greatest Chase and Cliffhanger of Them All...in the greatest setting.

Mount Rushmore.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Bump.

[–] millsey72 (10596) 2 years ago

Yea but what happens when Mt Rushmore gets cancelled and destroyed by the Left? What famous faces will go in its place?

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Yea but what happens when Mt Rushmore gets cancelled and destroyed by the Left? What famous faces will go in its place?

---

Ha. Michael Moore? AOC? Al Sharpton?

But seriously, folks: not only has Mount Rushmore come under attack for who it honors (and Teddy Roosevelt has always seemed a bit arbitrary after the Big Three of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln; I think Teddy was "hot" around the time the monument was carved, plus he was recognizable for his eyeglasses and moustache), but there are issues of the monument's placement in Native American territory.

The Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences opened a new "movie museum" in Hollywood after a COVID delay, and my understanding is that North by Northwest is referenced in a room that frames it with Native American grievances, which rather ignores the nature of the movie itself, yes?

That said, there is a publicity photo at Mount Rushmore of stars Cary Grant, James Mason and Eva Marie Saint wearing ceremonial Native American headdresses so AT THE TIME (1958/59) the filmmakers attempted to honor Native American culture.

No matter. If there is one thing that cancel culture cannot really cancel it is a film artist/showman/legend like Alfred Hitchocck, and as seminal and spectacular a romantic comedy suspense spy chase thriller as North by Northwest.

Hitchcock wanted a climax on Mount Rushmore because it LOOKED COOL. A chase across a "land of the giants" against a dark blue nightscape and -- as a matter of the politics of the time -- the defeat of Communist totalitarian spies right at the locus of American patriotic honor.

Hitchcock was a multi-millionaire in his time and world famous. He is still known today. The cancellers don't make much money and nobody knows who they are. They're nobodies. They will never be known.

I think North by Northwest will survive just fine.