Two Blocks to the Plaza
Nobody in North by Northwest ever thinks Roger Thornhill looks like George Kaplan.
This is worth pausing over, because the film has spent sixty-odd years being described as a story about mistaken identity, and the phrase carries an assumption the picture never honours. Mistaken identity implies a face — a resemblance, a double, a twin at the far end of a corridor. Hitchcock had made films on that principle before and would again. This one does something stranger. In the Oak Bar of the Plaza, two men are looking for a man they have never seen. A page boy walks the room calling a name. Thornhill, who wants to send a telegram to his mother, raises his hand to summon the boy. The gesture arrives at the same instant as the name, and the two men in the corner watch a hand go up in answer to a summons.
That is the whole error. Not a face. A signal, correctly read and wrongly attached.
Everything that follows — the bourbon, the knife, the aeroplane, the mountain — proceeds from a moment in which one man’s arm is interpreted as a reply. It is an unusually precise piece of construction, and it sets the terms for a film far less interested in who people are than in what people can be made to accept as evidence of who they are. Thornhill is not confused with Kaplan because he resembles him. He is confused with Kaplan because he behaved, for a second and a half, in a manner consistent with being him.
The film knows exactly what kind of man it has chosen for this. Before the hand goes up, we have watched Thornhill for perhaps four minutes, and in those four minutes he does almost nothing but generate persuasive statements without regard to their truth. He dictates advertising copy on the way to the elevator, cheerful boilerplate about ratings and sales curves. He instructs his secretary to send a box of chocolates to a woman, with a message; told that he sent the same message last time, he supplies another without embarrassment, because the message is a product and products are interchangeable. He commandeers a taxi from another passenger by announcing that Maggie is gravely ill, and when she points out that the driver knew he was lying, he delivers the sentence that ought to be inscribed above the whole picture: in the world of advertising, there is no such thing as a lie, only expedient exaggeration.
The line is usually quoted as a joke about Madison Avenue, and it is one. But listen to what he says immediately afterward, and the joke acquires a second floor. He asks Maggie whether he looks heavy-ish. He feels heavy-ish. He instructs her to leave a note on his desk in the morning: Think thin. He has just written an advertising campaign whose target market is himself. The man who believes there is no such thing as a lie also believes that the correct response to a private physical sensation is a slogan. His professional technique and his interior life run on the same equipment.
Hitchcock, who has already appeared in the film as a man failing to catch a bus, gives us all of this at a clip, over the last bars of Bernard Herrmann’s overture, and the pace matters. Herrmann had been asked by MGM for something Gershwinesque, urban, appropriate to a montage of Manhattan; he refused, and produced what he called a kaleidoscopic orchestral fandango designed to kick off the exciting rout which follows. The word to hold is fandango. Not a chase, not a pursuit — a dance, in triple time, with a partner, whose steps shift under the feet. It is the rhythm of two parties moving in relation to one another according to rules both of them accept. That is a much better description of what the film is about to do than “suspense” would be.
And before the fandango has finished, Saul Bass has already taught the eye the film’s grammar. Diagonal lines slice across a flat green field, forming a grid; credits ride up and down the lines, coming to rest on them, obeying them. Then the graphics dissolve into the mirrored façade of a Manhattan office building whose window frames match the grid exactly, and the abstraction turns out to have been a building all along — or rather, the reflection of a building, since what we are watching is the glass surface of one tower carrying the traffic of the street behind us. Then the reflection gives way to the street itself, and to crowds: bodies moving through revolving doors, missing buses, colliding at corners.
The sequence is often praised for setting a tone. It does something more useful than that. It demonstrates, in ninety seconds and without a word, that a pure diagram can become a surface, and a surface can become a world, and that at no point in the transition is there any moment where the viewer could say the illusion began. That is not a mood. That is a method, and it is the method the film’s plot will use on a human being.
A Suit Described Over the Telephone
Consider what the state has actually built.
When Vandamm recites the case against Thornhill in the library at Glen Cove, he does it ...
