The Master of Suspense and the Acrobat of the Drawing Room: How the Relationship of Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock Shaped Their Collaboration in Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest

by Carey Martin

Carey Martin is an associate professor in communication at East Carolina University. He has published in The Encyclopedia of Communication and Information and in The Holocaust Film Sourcebook. Dr. Martin teaches courses in film and television history and in screenwriting, and his research interests are in the history of American narrative motion pictures. His professional experience includes corporate and broadcast television and digital production. He earned the M.F.A. and the Ph.D. at Florida State University.

From the very beginning of the auteurist movement, Alfred Hitchcock’s place in the pantheon of auteurs was secure. This may go without saying; yet several quotes from Hitchcock show how the director’s own words backed up what the critics were finding on screen. In an interview with Andre Bazin himself, held (ironically, as we shall see) on the set of To Catch a Thief (1955), Hitchcock was prompt in his response to Bazin’s final question:

Does he [Hitchcock] use any improvisation on the set? – None at all; he had To Catch a Thief in his mind, complete, for two months… how would he have been able to devote a whole hour to me right in the middle of shooting if he had to think about his film at the same time?” (69)

In a later interview, Hitchcock lamented that his pre-production planning was so complete that production was a bore, stating “I wish I didn’t have to shoot the picture” ( Crowley, Markle and Pratley, 25). His drive for control was only confirmed in the minds of some critics by his even more famous evaluation of his on-camera players, “Actors should be treated like cattle” – oft-confirmed, one writer even recalls watching Hitchcock say this to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show (Miller, 2, Abele, 1). Years of critical analysis of Hitchcock’s films have for the most part solidified and built upon this foundation of Hitchcock as so-called control freak and disdainful of actors. Hitchcock himself seems to have been sincere in his vision of total control of the picture, and in his feelings of production as anticlimactic; in his 1937 article “Direction,” long before anyone ever dreamed of the auteur, he wrote that “…working on the script is the real making of the film, for me. When I’ve done it, the film is finished already in my mind” (33). Hitchcock re-stated his feelings in his article on Rear Window (1954), written thirty years later, and added a comment that seemed a direct shot on the school of Method acting that had arisen in the intervening decades: “I prefer to make a film on paper. People ask me, ‘Don’t you ever improvise on the set?’ and I say, ‘No, I prefer to improvise in the office while we’re writing’” (41).

Despite all this, the image of Hitchcock as control freak and actor-hater was, to some extent, as carefully crafted as the television image of Hitchcock’s “Good evening.” Just as the television Hitchcock was the man himself, but not the whole man, so this idea of Hitchcock as hyper-auteur is part of the artist but not the whole. Hitchcock was capable of working with, not just through, actors, if those actors had established a mutually supportive relationship with him. And of all the actors with whom he worked, no actor had a better relationship with Alfred Hitchcock than Cary Grant.

Hitchcock and Grant built on that relationship to work together, integrating the actor’s gifts into the director’s style, to create their four classics of suspense: Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest (1959). To examine how this happened, we must first establish the professional and personal relationship between the actor and the director. Certainly critics have recognized the importance of Grant in Hitchcock’s work; Rothman calls Grant “…that archetypal Hitchcock figure…” and states that what is most important about North by Northwest’s Roger Thornhill was, “He is Cary Grant” (121-122); Meola concurs, calling Grant “iconic” and Thornhill a perfect example of Emerson’s “representative man” (123). Sarris concurs, calling Grant’s four films “ultra-Hitchcockian” (90), but Sarris places Jimmy Stewart’s four films with the master of suspense -- Rope (1948), Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Vertigo (1958) --on the same level. This points up an immediate problem for anyone claiming a privileged relationship between Grant and Hitchcock; the director worked just as much with Stewart. However, the number of films completed does not tell the whole story. McGilligan asserts that, had Carole Lombard had her wish, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) would have been Grant and Hitchcock’s first film together (267). At almost the same time, the director tried to get Grant for the lead in Foreign Correspondent (1940) (Spoto, Dark Side, 237), but concerns with the script led the actor to pass on the project (Perry, 53). In 1942, Hitchcock proposed adapting the John Buchan novel Greenmantle into a film, but the project never got off the ground (McGilligan, 306). Another abortive project was “Weep No More,” a script begun during the filming of Notorious as the first in a series of formal partnerships between the actor and the director (McGilligan, 386). For Spellbound (1945), Grant was Hitchcock’s first choice again; film editor Alan Obiston, sitting in on story conferences, stated that “Hitch would say, ‘OK, you’re the girl. I’m Grant,’” but the actor turned the role down (McGilligan, 354-55, 357). Hitchcock also wanted Grant for Stewart’s role in Rope, but Grant’s contract obligations prevented this (Spoto, Dark Side, 305); as one of Stewart’s biographers put it, “Cary Grant was [Hitchcock’s] first choice, but RKO were not in the mood for lending him out” (Coe, 94). Also, screenwriter Bess Taffel states that Grant himself was even more against this role than the Spellbound lead (McGilligan, 406). Grant did want the role of the husband in Dial M for Murder (1954) (Krohn, 130), but again circumstances interfered, though the exact reason is unclear. McGilligan asserts that Jack Warner vetoed the deal to preserve Grant’s image and to keep salaries down (469), while DeRosa mentions Grant’s salary alone as the deal-breaker (90). The Trouble With Harry (1955) was pitched to the studio as starring Grant (McGilligan, 504), but again Grant’s steep price interfered (DeRosa, 129). McGilligan also states that Grant was Hitchcock’s first choice for The Birds (1963), but price again interfered (614); and for Torn Curtain (1966), but scheduling conflicts for Walk Don’t Run (1966) and the actor’s final retirement prevented this as well (663). In perhaps the most tantalizing unrealized project, Hitchcock pitched and Grant tentatively accepted a modern adaptation of Hamlet (McGilligan, 387), confirming this by telegraphing his intentions to partner Sidney Bernstein (Auiler, 553), though the project was derailed by a threatened lawsuit (Leff, 258). Had all gone as planned, then, Grant and Hitchcock would have collaborated on fifteen films. As tellingly, Stewart lobbied intensely for Grant’s role in North by Northwest. However, Hitchcock had only discussed the film with Stewart when it appeared that Grant would be unavailable (Dewey, 381). Hitchcock put Stewart off until Stewart’s commitment to another film made it impossible to cast him, because his first and only choice had always been Grant (Spoto, Dark Side, 402-403). According to one biographer, “Stewart was bitterly disappointed” (Coe, 159), but there is no record that Hitchcock ever acknowledged this. Professionally, thus, we see that Grant did hold a privileged relationship with Hitchcock.

The actor and the director were also close friends off screen. According to one source, this began in 1937; during a trip to New York City, Grant was one of the first Hollywood personages to welcome Alfred and Alma Hitchcock to America (Higham and Moseley, 88). During the 1940s, Grant became a frequent guest at Hitchcock’s private dinner parties (Spoto, Dark Side, 288); this continued through the end of the director’s life. At the ceremony for the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, it was Cary Grant who sat at Hitchcock’s left hand (Spoto, Dark Side, 7). Grant was also a welcome guest at the luncheon to honor Hitchcock on the occasion of his knighthood (Spoto, Dark Side, 553).

Grant once quipped that he and Hitchcock got along so well and so quickly because they both remembered “liquorice all-sorts” ( Taylor, 175). But mere shared recollections of their childhood days in England would not have produced the sort of bond that existed between the two. Cary Grant, in one of the evening talks he gave toward the end of his life, had this to say:

Hitch and I had a rapport and understanding deeper than words. He was a very agreeable human being, and we were very compatible. I always went to work whistling when I worked with him because everything on the set was just as you envisioned it would be. Nothing ever went wrong. He was so incredibly well prepared. I never knew anyone as capable. He was a tasteful, intelligent, decent, and patient man who knew the actor’s business as well as he knew his own. (Nelson, 321)

In an earlier interview, Grant had listed Hitchcock (along with Howard Hawks, George Stevens, Leo McCarey, and George Cukor) as favorites of his, because as directors they would allow “… the release of improvisation (italics mine) during the rehearsing of each scene… to discover how far out I could go with confidence while guided by their quiet, sensitive directorial approval” (McCann, 150).

In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, the director was as effusive in his praise of Grant:

Cary is marvelous, you see. One doesn’t direct Cary Grant, one simply puts him in front of a camera. And, you see, he enables the audience to identify with the main character. I mean by that, Cary Grant represents a man we know. He’s not a stranger. (476)

And, in a later interview for the American Film Institute, Hitchcock continued on the same theme:

First of all, you have available to you [as director] a film star by the name of Cary Grant. Don’t lose sight of that element. You are actually playing a character, but you are also playing the personality of Cary Grant. The value of having Cary Grant, the film star, is that the audience gets a little more emotion out of Cary Grant than they would from an unknown, because there is identification. There are many members of the audience who like Cary Grant, whether they know about his character in the scenes or not. (92)

And, according to George Barrie (founder of Faberge), Hitchcock also once said, “Knowing Cary is the greatest association I’ve had with any film actor. Cary’s the only actor I ever loved in my whole life” (Nelson, 325).

The closeness of the personal relationship parallels the closeness of the professional one. This is not to suggest that the two men never disagreed; screenwriter Taffel states that the disagreement over Rope was so sharp that it derailed the proposed partnership (McGilligan, 406). Still, it was the professionalism of both parties that enabled the personal relationship. Irene Dunne, in an eight-paragraph article about Grant written decades after their work together, mentions his legendary charm once. The bulk of the article recounts her view of Grant’s “…excellence of his timing… depth of his performance… concentration and preparedness… intelligence and seriousness of approach;” Dunne calls his Oscar-nominated work on Penny Serenade (1941)“… an object lesson in professionalism,” praises Grant as “… a painstaking worker and keen mind at work…[with] a large degree of objectivity and self-discipline,” and mentions his enthusiasm for his work as both the first impression he made on her, and the last (386-89). Everett Mattlin, then the editor of Gentlemen’s Quarterly, would observe the same qualities in a photo shoot for his magazine in 1964. Mattlin recalled that Grant extolled “… the virtues of camaraderie and bonding…” and was “… totally cooperative… [Grant] enjoyed being photographed” (8). In short, far from relying on his charm and looks, Grant was the consummate professional as an actor; exactly the kind of actor a consummate professional director such as Hitchcock could come to love.

With the relationship established, we must now consider what Hitchcock wanted from the actors under his direction. A full examination of this subject would of course be a book in itself. However, two quotes from the master of suspense seem particularly illuminating. In the Bogdanovich interview, Hitchcock states, “Relying on actors is borrowing from the stage. I think that montage is the essential thing in a motion picture” (476). In Truffaut’s book, the director went into further detail:

In my opinion, the chief requisite for an actor is the ability to do nothing well, which is by no means as easy as it sounds. He should be willing to be utilized and wholly integrated into the picture by the director and the camera. He must allow the camera to determine the proper emphasis and the most effective dramatic highlights. (80)

Given these statements, we will see how Hitchcock used the audience’s identification with Grant and Grant’s ability to “do nothing well” to create suspense. We will also see that, as the relationship of trust and respect deepened between the two, Hitchcock began to use more of the actor’s gifts than the director’s reputation for control might suggest.

Their first collaboration, in 1941, would not have worked at all were it not for this intense audience identification. As Hitchcock once noted, “Often, you see, when a character is doing wrong, the audience still will want him to succeed” (Bogdanovich, 476) – true enough, but not generally to the point of cold-blooded murder. Yet, throughout most of Suspicion, that is exactly what the audience suspects Grant’s character, Johnnie Aysgarth, of plotting. Of course, it has long been thought that using Grant in this film actually weakened it. Hitchcock, speaking of his earlier effort The Lodger (1927), told Truffaut, “I ran into the same problem sixteen years later when I made Suspicion with Cary Grant. Cary Grant could not be a murderer.” Truffaut asked, “Would he have refused?” and Hitchcock replied, “No, not necessarily. But the producers would surely have refused” (31). Grant confirmed this some time later: “I thought the original was marvelous. It was a perfect Hitchcock ending. But the studios insisted that they didn’t want to have Cary Grant play a murderer” (Nelson, 175). This is true, but incomplete. As Worland demonstrated in his 2002 article, RKO was reluctant to have any of the possible leading men play a murderer (6), so Grant’s presence added nothing to the difficulty; further, although the ending seen today was not the one originally shot, Suspicion’s original ending still kept Aysgarth from being a killer (14), and the final ending was created after the reaction of preview audiences, not studio executives. Still, the script was unfinished when shooting started, and underwent changes throughout the shoot (Nelson, 174). And there were other problems, notably the tension between Grant and his leading lady. “Grant privately observed at the time that… anyone who knew him and Joan Fontaine would also know that he was very likely to strangle her right away” (Taylor, 176). In fact, such observations were not entirely private; one biographer relates that Grant told co-workers on the set that Fontaine’s behavior made murder perfectly understandable (Harris, 109). Another source asserts a cause for this anger; Grant was irritated by Fontaine’s frequent absences from the set and by her frequent temperamental behavior – in other words, his sense of professionalism was offended (Higham and Moseley, 125).

In an ironic touch, both these difficulties actually wound up working in the film’s favor. More important to the success of Suspicion, however, was Grant’s ability to act in Hitchcock’s preferred manner, through the camera and through montage. This is demonstrated in the very first scene, as Johnnie Aysgarth (Grant) and Lina McLaidlaw (Fontaine) meet for the first time. The film begins in total blackness, as we hear the noise of the moving train. Then, Grant’s voice: “Oh, I beg your pardon. Is that your leg? I had no idea we were going into a tunnel.” We do not see his face until he is almost done with his lines. Then, as he is sitting down opposite Fontaine, he alludes to his hangover: “After last night, my head couldn’t stand it.” The next shot is a close up of Grant holding his head and looking down. We cut to a close up of Fontaine’s shoes, and the point-of-view perspective tilts up her legs to her lap, where she holds a book on Child Psychology. We cut back to the CU of Grant, removing his hand from his head and looking further up; cut back to a continuation of the POV tilt from the book to Fontaine’s bespectacled face; and the sequence concludes with a CU of Grant with a perfectly nonplussed expression. This sequence, though simple to describe, is a perfect example of how Grant allowed Hitchcock to “utilize and wholly integrate” him into the picture through montage. First, Grant contributes his famous voice with no visual; then, his famous visage with no accompanying dialogue. At this point, it is fairly obvious what Grant is thinking. But the technique of montage is also used to keep the audience from fully understanding his thoughts. This is seen in the final sequence, the drive through the seaside cliffs. Throughout the drive, as Lina grows more and more hysterical, Johnnie’s profile remains impassive, stony, as he steers ever more recklessly down the winding road. This impassiveness serves to prolong Lina’s, and the audience’s, paranoia – suspicion – until the final denouement.

Grant’s ability to do nothing well on camera is also in evidence in Suspicion. Most notably, after the reading of Lina’s father’s will, Grant retires to the study for a stiff drink. There, facing the portrait of the only person who openly disliked and distrusted him, Grant’s quietly says “You win, old boy.” He then toasts the portrait and drinks, with his back to the camera. Grant brings off this moment so well that, as we shall see, Hitchcock uses the same technique in later films.

In addition to his ability to work within Hitchcock’s paradigms of acting, Grant was also able to act in the more traditional sense. That is, he was able to bring his own experience and emotions to bear to create a realistic character. Three specific examples bear note. In the first, Grant uses the physical grace imparted by his acrobatic training to waltz Fontaine out of a crowd of his female admirers and male detractors, straight into their first dance together, and then out a side door of the ballroom for a moonlight drive. In the second, Grant uses his considerable personal charm to bring off a story about counting his romantic conquests in lieu of counting sheep without seeming a total boor. From that story, however, Grant instantly lets his own personal dislike of Fontaine show through in a moment of pure hostility when the actress says she loves him. That real life animus shows through again when Lina nearly ruins Johnnie’s plan to bilk his old friend Beaky. In a take which lasts approximately a minute, Grant maintains this mood through a long dolly and tilt as he and Fontaine walk through their front hall and up a long curving stair, with the window panes making a web-like silhouette on the wall behind Grant. This shot is echoed after Grant has a long discussion of the perfect poison with a mystery author. He silently (and with back to the camera again for part of the time) leads Fontaine up those stairs at night, with the same web-like silhouette on the wall behind them. The element of hostility previously established has now become actual menace.

Ironically, it was Fontaine who took home the Oscar for Suspicion. Another common factor between Grant and Hitchcock is that neither was ever honored with the Academy Award for their work on a specific picture. But Grant, unlike Fontaine, did work with Hitchcock again, five years later in Notorious. By all accounts the relationships on this picture were much more pleasant, though like all films this one too had its difficult moments. As Grant recalled, “He [Hitchcock] could be very calm in the most difficult of situations. A fire broke out once on the set, and he just looked around and asked someone to take care of it so we could finish the shoot” (Nelson, 321).

The trust that had been established on the previous film meant that the director could use the actor to do nothing even more radically than before. In Suspicion, Grant successfully played one scene with his back to the camera. In Notorious, Hitchcock called on Grant to repeat the feat no less than seven times. The first example is Grant’s first appearance on screen. The scene is a party thrown by Ingrid Bergman’s character, Alicia Huberman. For at least a minute and a half, in a medium shot as Alicia subtly staggers around her party, Grant sits in the foreground with his back to the camera, saying nothing. The shot fades to black and fades up much later in the evening, arcing around to reveal Grant’s face – still saying nothing but, his expression plainly says, observing everything.

Grant’s character, T. K. Devlin, then goes for a moonlit drive with Alicia. In a move showing either nerves of steel or brains of stone, he allows the intoxicated Alicia to drive. The ride ends not as unhappily as it might, but when it does end, an enraged Alicia attacks Devlin. When he subdues her, Grant positions himself so that his back is to the camera and is blocking our view of Bergman. We hear, but do not see, the sound of a punch, and Bergman slumps unconscious. Our imaginations fill in the blanks.

Our imaginations are also forced to fill in the blanks during two of the most important first encounters between Devlin and the sobered-up Alicia. During the scene in which Grant makes her a job offer, there is a significantly long shot of Grant walking away from Bergman, back to the camera, as he questions her own denial of patriotism. Later, just before their first kiss, Grant has his face turned away from the camera again. These postures obviously indicate an unwillingness to truly open up to Alicia, but they also prevent the audience from being fully engaged in Devlin’s thoughts.

His thoughts, through most of the rest of the film, revolve around the notoriety of the title, specifically as it applies to Alicia. Significantly, in the two locations in which the subject comes up most directly, Grant spends much of his time with his back to the camera. In the embassy office, where the true nature of Alicia’s role is first revealed, Grant plays much of several long shots with his back to the camera. Devlin is forced to tell Alicia of the Mata Hari-type plan in the hotel room that they are sharing. Upon first entering the scene, Grant crosses and stands with his back to the camera at the very rear of the shot. The framing and his posture communicate his distress, as they do back in the same apartment after Alicia’s first dinner with the Nazi master spy. For at least half a minute, Grant has his back to the camera and is completely silent – again, relying on camera angle and body language to convey the meaning. Finally, back in the office as the other agents discuss the mission, Grant is again at the rear of the scene with his back to the camera. As the agents begin to slur Alicia personally, Hitchcock cuts to a CU of Grant’s back – it is only after that that Grant turns to defend the woman he has come to love.

As in their earlier work together, though, Hitchcock also gave Grant the opportunity to use his personal acting skills. The censors of the time had decreed that no on-screen kiss could last longer than three seconds. Hitchcock felt the passion between Alicia and Devlin merited a much longer kiss – significantly, as Rothman notes, it was the first time Hitchcock had worked with two great romantic stars (246). It was the physical grace of Grant and Bergman that gave the director his solution. He had Grant and Bergman move about the set, never breaking their embrace but breaking the actual kiss every three seconds, to create the famous “moving kiss” scene (Phillips, 114). It is difficult to imagine any of the other leading men of the period, with the possible exception of Fred Astaire, being able to bring this difficult scene off; Krohn uses this very scene to debunk the “There was no room for improvisation” myth of Hitchcock (14-15).

Nine years would pass before Hitchcock and Grant worked together again. Hitchcock himself characterized To Catch a Thief as “a lightweight story” (Spoto, Art, 251) and Grant was initially interested in the project on the basis of one telegram asking him how he’d like to work with Hitchcock and Grace Kelly (Taylor, 225). Grant once said of Kelly, “She made acting look as easy as Frank Sinatra made singing appear” (Nelson, 270). He was then in his first retirement, but Hitchcock brought him out of it by telling him, “There isn’t a thing wrong with you, old man, that a first-rate screenplay won’t cure;” that and the lures of Ms. Kelly and the Riviera were enough to bring Grant on board (Harris, 165-166). Production accounts indicate that the film became almost a working vacation for all involved. As one chronicler notes,

And since he was among friends, Hitch relaxed his usual rules and allowed quite a lot of improvisation. In the [picnic] scene, shot high above the Riviera… Cary Grant and Grace Kelly found themselves in a cheerful, silly mood… and just began to make up the dialogue as they went along, bringing in, of course, the necessary plot points. Hitch did three takes of the scene, each completely different, and

loved it. ( Taylor, 225)

Grant confirmed this himself:

In the picnic scene – where we eat chicken in the car – we exhausted all the film in the camera but went on talking anyway. I asked her, “How is it that you’re so experienced at dialogue?” She told me she had done dozens of soaps. Soaps were live in those days, and you sometimes had to ad-lib. I was awed by her. We all loved her very, very much. (Nelson, 271)

Actress Brigitte Auber, playing Danielle Foussard in the film, confirmed the use of on-set improvisation, saying Hitchcock would call on Grant to change things, and Grant would initiate changes himself (McGilligan, 498-99). This is not to say that a Second City-like atmosphere prevailed on set; Krohn notes that Hitchcock gave Grant and Bergman solid guidelines within which to improvise (97) and further notes that the picnic scene’s recorded dialogue closely matches the script (149). Writer John Michael Hayes even “ran interference” between Hitchcock and Grant to keep the actor from improvising too much (DeRosa, 113-114).

This affection between the co-stars, and Hitchcock’s willingness to relax some of his near-obsessive control, created an on-screen relationship that was the most relaxed of the three films so far. The fact that such a relaxed and, dare we say it, improvisational relationship was being established as Hitchcock told Bazin such things never happened on his sets only makes it more amusing. Of course, Hitchcock also made good use of Grant’s physical grace, most notably when the fifty-year-old star had to believably prowl across the rooftop sets; Auber and Grant did indeed do those scenes together, 80 feet above the stage floor (DeRosa 117). . The nearest that Hitchcock comes to his usual approach to acting-through-montage is during the wild car ride through the winding cliff top roads of the Riviera. With Grace Kelly at the wheel, Grant’s facial expression is determinedly calm during most of the ride, but Hitchcock reveals his nervousness through repeated shots of Grant’s hands in his lap, reflexively clenching and unclenching.

This brings us to Grant and Hitchcock’s final work together. Fittingly enough, the film that Hitchcock called “the American Thirty-Nine Steps (1935)” (Bogdanovich, 531) is today acknowledged as a masterpiece for both actor and director. “I like to exploit the fine line between comedy and tragedy; I like to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary,” Hitchcock once told Bogdanovich (476), and it is “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose”, Hitchcock’s working title (Bogdanovich, 475) that does that most successfully. For it is in the 1959 classic North by Northwest, as Hitchcock told Truffaut, that “The MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!” (100)

Though the MacGuffin was nothing at all, Hitchcock allowed Grant to do more of everything on this picture than on any other. The director had a set rebuilt that Grant found unrealistic and used Grant’s suggestion of a previously unplanned camera angle ( Taylor, 249). Screenwriter Ernest Lehman would go over the script with Grant in his trailer, using his suggestions for rewrites (Auiler, 25). Martin Landau, playing one of the supporting villains, recalled that Grant even helped Hitchcock “choreograph all the movements” of the auction-room scene (Higham and Moseley, 245-246). And, while shooting in the Plaza Hotel – where Grant kept an apartment – Grant was not called until absolutely everything was ready. This led to one onlooker’s recollection:

One morning he [Grant] came down, walked through the crowd, picked up a telephone and put it down (to match a studio close up), then walked over to the camera and looked through it to see what the outside line for his walk would be. [A crew member] said to Hitch, “You haven’t even said ‘Good morning’ to Cary. How does he know what to do?” Hitch answered casually, “Oh, he’s been walking across this lobby for years. I don’t need to tell him how.” ( Taylor, 249)

And Hitchcock used all of Grant’s other gifts to their fullest. His acrobatics background is put on display in the window ledge escape from the hospital, the climb into the villain’s cliff top house, and, of course, the Mt. Rushmore sequence. That grace is also put to good use in Grant’s train compartment kissing scene with Eva Marie Saint. Grant put his comedy background to good use in the elevator scene, where his character, Roger Thornhill, must do a slow burn as his mother, a car full of strangers, and two thugs bent on killing him laugh uproariously at him. The comedy background was also evident throughout Grant’s inebriation scenes – even the (by now thematic) car chase down twisting cliff top roads. Further, in North by Northwest, Grant gets to act perhaps a greater range of emotions – befuddlement, jealousy, hot anger and cold fear – than in any of his other films with Hitchcock.

And, it is also in this film that Grant displays his finest moment of doing nothing for Hitchcock’s montage. This occurs just prior to the crop-duster scene. With the exception of the shower scene from Psycho (1960), this scene has been analyzed more than any other in Hitchcock’s films; for example, LaValley’s Focus on Hitchcock includes a twenty-four page breakdown of the sequence in storyboard form, using line drawings to illustrate. The one element of the scene that we will focus on here, and which seems unremarked in previous analyses, is time. From the time Thornhill gets off the bus, until the car stops to let off the man who notices a plane “dustin’ crops where there ain’t no crops,” Grant must hold the screen. The scene begins when Grant gets off the bus. For the next full minute, we cut between medium close ups of Grant and extreme long shots of the featureless Midwestern landscape. At one minute, a car passes. At one minute thirty seconds, a second car passes. At two minutes, a truck passes. At two minutes fifteen seconds, the car carrying the other man appears. The other man exits the car at two minutes forty five seconds, and Grant crosses the road and speaks at three minutes thirty seconds. In other words, Grant holds the audience’s attention, without speaking, for three and a half minutes – and does so with no other human being on screen (and very little of anything else) for all but forty-five seconds of that time! Only a great actor and a true star could hold the screen with so little to do for so long a time. That Grant is able to do so is proof that he was both.

It is also proof of the absolute identification the audience has with Cary Grant. In his first film with Hitchcock, Grant brought the audience onto the side of a bad guy who ultimately is innocent. In his second, the audience identified with Grant playing a good guy who must do some nasty things. In his third, the audience was thoroughly on the side of Grant’s bad guy, turned good, who may or may not have turned bad again. It is satisfying that in their final film together, Grant and Hitchcock gave their audience a fairly ordinary fellow of fairly ordinary faults, who rises above himself to become a hero. Perhaps we can see this not only as a gift to their audiences, who recognized their greatness long before the Academy establishment or the auteurist rebels, but to each other – and for the same reasons – as well.

Works Cited

Alfred Hitchcock

Director Links:

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