What would happen if The Penguin and Harley Quinn went on a road trip date? Possibly more realistic a proposition than this whimsy from Kogonada which begins with potential but will likely only bring the most gooey romantics along for the whole ride.
Matt Kennedy/Sony Pictures
Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie star as David and Sarah (don’t worry, you won’t forget their names, they say them to each other in pretty much every sentence), a pair of singletons at a soggy wedding who bristle at the idea of marriage and commitment. They have both arrived in rental cars hired from a quirky outfit run by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge doing a German accent. In an opener that plays like Charlie Kaufman, David has found his way there to be offered a crappy 90s car with a weird GPS system by a profanity-dropping saleswoman who sits in a warehouse like a soundstage and instead of going through the collision damage waiver, suggests that all of life is a performance.
Matt Kennedy/Sony PicturesMatt Kennedy/Sony Pictures
Certainly, we get performance from the two incredibly charismatic leads as a Burger King meet-cute (seriously, you’ll want a Whopper with cheese) morphs into a phantasmagorical odyssey where the magical GPS (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) takes the duo to a series of picturesque doors which open to seminal moments in each of their lives. Moments that might explain why they both struggle to maintain a relationship, why they might desperately need each other. David has issues from a high school romantic wipeout and parental expectations of perfection; Sarah is a ‘quirky girl’ who visits museums at night and didn’t tell Mommy she loved her… Everything is colour coded (him: blue, her: red), pretty, whimsical, lens-flared, rainy.
Matt Kennedy/Sony Pictures
There are moments of delight: David performing the lead in his high school play on muscle memory, Sarah returning home for teen-years mashed potatoes and Big on the telly. Together, Farrell and Robbie are electric – but trapped in a film that doesn’t know if it wants to be cute or deep, or both. Tonally, it zig-zags, making it hard to get an emotional read on characters who are both intriguingly self-obsessed and drearily idiosyncratic. The takeaways are that love must be entered into, not just fallen into; that Farrell can sell the hell out a musical number, that Robbie once again proves her ability to make fast food romantic and appetising after Birds Of Prey’s perfect egg sandwich.
A sweet film with good intentions and great collaborators. But one that doesn’t ever transcend the page it’s written on.
Downton Abbey has bewitched the world over six series with its celebration of a bygone world and Britishisms – and this farewell feature is a fond one, loaded with everything one would expect from such an undertaking. By now we’re in 1930 and the clothes are slinkier, the morals looser and times a-changing. The toffs of Downton are facing financial tightness, the Wall Street crash is wreaking US havoc, social stratas are softening and unbeknownst to anyone, World War II is gestating.
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In this between-wars moment Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) causes controversy when she attends a London party as a divorced woman (and of course, wearing a stunning red dress), the Earl and Countess of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern) are contemplating moving into the granny flat recently vacated by the late Dowager Countess Crawley (the late Maggie Smith), and Noël Coward (Arty Froushan) and Uncle Harold (Paul Giamatti) turn up with money woes and lessons in acceptance. Goodbyes are the order of the day; below-stairs Mr Carson (Jim Carter) and Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) are retiring and their send-off allows for audiences to process their own letting go of all the characters.
Rory Mulvey/Focus FeaturesRory Mulvey/Focus Features
As reliably cosy as the cup of steaming tea served in the library, The Grande Finale ticks all the Downton tropes as it bows out. Society snobbery (at a Mayfair ball and the local agriculture show), a spiffing day out at the races with fabulous period fashions, the servants being sweet on their masters, the aristocrats being the ‘nice’ kind, a huge dinner party causing chaos in the kitchen and, in a button-pushing finale, the ghosts of beloved characters being given their flowers under the gimlet eye of Maggie Smith’s portrait hanging in the main hall. There’s no particular drama (aside from a bit of sauce from Alessandro Nivola’s bounder American visitor) and the silver still gets polished while people sigh about giving up the London town house. Those who have not been along for the ride might wonder about the attraction, but die-hard fans will get their tweed-and-pearls fix.
There’s a nice nod to Dog Day Afternoon in casting Al Pacino in this real-life hostage negotiation story of the little man breaking over a loan and sticking it to the mortgage company one frosty morning in Indianapolis. Gus Van Sant’s latest feels as though it’s come from the same era (impeccable seventies production design) and deals with similar feelings of frustration.
In 1977, small-time land developer Tony Kiritsi (Bill Skarsgård) walked into the Meridian Mortgage Company HQ and took the son of the big cheese, Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery) hostage – looping a ‘dead man’s wire’ around his neck. Attaching the wire to the trigger of a shotgun and to himself, Kiritsi’s crude booby-trap ensured that if he was felled, or his captive tried to escape, Hall would be killed instantly. Kiritsi was aggrieved that Meridian’s CEO (Pacino, with a molasses accent) had ruined his real-estate deals and caused his business to collapse. As cops and the local DJ (Colman Domingo) got involved, Indianapolis was gripped by the stand-off as Kiritsi holed up in his bomb-rigged apartment with Hall.
Van Sant taps into the dark humour of amiable mid-westerners negotiating a high-pressure situation as Tony and Dick are unfailingly polite to each other despite their situation, the cops personally know their perp and unbelievably cool DJ Fred Temple (Domingo, who was made for this role) has chats with Tony during the crisis. In the days before a more coordinated and tech response, the law enforcement and media approach to the situation seems almost quaint. Skarsgård is jittery-righteous as a man who believes that he is making a stand for many people crushed under the boot of big business, while Montgomery exudes the dejected calm of a man who’s got Daddy issues and has never been good enough for his flashy Pa, who continues with his vacation in Florida during the stand-off.
With things to say about corporate America and social media (Kiritsi uses local TV and radio unchecked as a platform for his beliefs), Dead Man’s Wire is both a history lesson on a largely forgotten incident and a reflection on whether we’ve matured as a society since. It’s also a welcome return to form for Van Sant.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photography courtesy of STEFANIA ROSINI/ELEVATED FILMS Dead Man’s Wire premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival Released in cinemas at a later date
Kathryn Bigelow excels at building tension around real-life horror as seen in the bomb disposal squad in Iraq in The Hurt Locker or the countdown search for Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. She raises the bar again with a film so terrifying that you won’t know whether to sob or scream watching it through your fingers. Rashomon-style in the retelling, A House of Dynamite follows different US government workers during twenty life-changing minutes when a nuclear missile is detected launching and heading for the US. Over three repeated chapters, Noah Oppenheim’s detailed script tracks the complex protocols triggered by such an event and the bravery required of personnel when the world looks very likely to end. Of course they’ve trained for this, but when it’s real, when 10 million people will die imminently, when DEFCON escalates from four to one within a quarter of an hour – what is the human response?
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If that sounds like a standard opener to an actioner, it’s not. There are no easy answers or Jack Ryan figures ready to save the day. Even the sensible president (Idris Elba) is so confounded by his choices when given what he describes as a ‘diner menu’ of devastating no-win retaliation options, fumbles. This is a film that opens with normal people having a normal morning before armageddon begins; in Fort Greenly, Alaska a military team assume that a heatscore on their satallite tracking system must be an anomaly, reporting it to a cool duty office in the White House Situation Room (Rebecca Ferguson) who opens up dialogue with the Secretary Of Defence (Jared Harris), military brass and security advisors. As things become more serious by the minute, the magnitude of being the first to understand the scale of the calamity hits home. And that’s when A House of Dynamite becomes an emotional gutpunch as calm calls to loved ones are made, only select personnel are taken to the bunker to be saved and the time on the clock ticks down.
Eros Hoagland/Netflix
With on-screen captions explaining the acronyms used in the theatre of war and a script that informs without dumbing down, it’s horrifically easy to keep track of the options (or lack of them) in the case of nuclear war. Without knowing what country has launched the attack there is only a choice of escalation or de-escalation, both irreparably changing the world and killing millions. As the situation is viewed from three different levels of leadership the question remains the same to the audience in each chapter: what would you do? And, perhap more scarily, what would current real-world global leaders do?
Sobering, taut and as precision-executed as the White House procedures, A House Of Dynamite is a classy, almost unbearable watch that will make you squeeze family members close after viewing, breathing a sign of relief that, for now, this scenario remains in the realms of make-believe.
Eros Hoagland/Netflix
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of NETFLIX A House of Dynamite premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival and is out now
Have we ever seen Dwayne Johnson cry on-screen? Having made a career as a comedy and action ace, Johnson gets uncharacteristically vulnerable in his first dramatic indie role, the moments where he breaks and sobs as far away from his cultivated ‘Rock’ persona as the face prosthetics genius Kazu Hiro gives him to play real-life UFC champ, Mark Kerr. It’s a welcome gear change; beefed up and raw, without a raised eyebrow in sight, it could be the role that takes him all the way to Oscar night.
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Written and directed by Benny Safdie, the film follows free-style wrestler Kerr during three tumultuous years when his involvement in the sport was pioneering and shaping the UFC behemoth we know today, and when his personal life was a challenge. We meet him in 1997 as an undefeated fighter with an addiction to painkillers, and a relationship with his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt) as punishing as anything in the ring. From the off, Safdie and Johnson zone in on Kerr as a gentle giant; he’s a beast when the bell rings but also asks after injured opponents, talks sweetly to kids and grannies, asks for the window shade on flights to be opened so he can appreciate the sunset and likes to prune cacti. Rage is reserved for interactions with Dawn, who knows how to push his buttons to the point of ripping doors off hinges. Though the love between them is clear – beautifully played within the real-life friendship and familiarity of Blunt and Johnson – neither the drugs or the romance are productive. That’s evident to Kerr’s bestie, Mark Coleman (MMA fighter, Ryan Bader) who trains his friend and is another sweet man in a cage-fighter body. As Kerr negotiates his first loss, the rules and pay of the UFC, rehab and police run-ins, he learns how personal experience informs the sport and the teaching moment in not being invincible.
It’s the classic arc of a sports movie and one we’ve seen many times before – with Safdie even popping a Rocky beanie hat on Johnson and giving him steps to run up during a training montage – but the wins are not necessarily about reinventing the wheel. The pleasure here is in watching Johnson disappear inside another person, impressively unrecognisable in a wig and prosthetic nose/brows, his heart on his sweaty sleeve. Blunt is equally delightful as the perma-tanned Dawn, bringing a brightness to the brittle as a woman who wants neither the drug-dulled sweetheart who collapses nor the snippy, sober killjoy she gets after rehab. Safdie also chooses to bring the real-life Kerr into proceedings, giving him his due in a third reel segment that tracks him as he cheerfully does his grocery shop, a curiously moving moment. A standard biopic then, but one that awards bodies will likely reward. Voters love transformation from a performer and Johnson provides that not only in his physically immense muscle mass but also in his decisive reinvention as an actor. That the story mirrors elements of his own hard-scrabble background and fist-bought success can only add to the narrative.
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Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of A24 The Smashing Machinepremiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival and is in cinemas now
Guillermo del Toro has been yearning to give life to Mary Shelley’s classic story of reanimation, morals and monstrosity for decades and it shows in the care and attention in this ravishing retelling. It begins with a bang as a 19th century Royal Danish ship trapped in ice near the North Pole discovers wounded scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) being pursued by a super-human ‘thing’ which can dispatch sailors with ease and is relentless in its mission. ‘What manner of creature is that?’ asks the horrified captain. ‘What manner of devil made him?’
Ken Woroner/Netflix
Those are queries del Toro seeks to explore as we flashback to Victor’s unhappy childhood at the hands of his corporal punishment dad (Charles Dance) and grief at the demise of his beloved mother (Lauren Collins). Determined to conquer death, we next meet Victor as a dandyish rebel showing off his latest experiments to appalled surgeons in Edinburgh. As a gasping, bloodied thorax and arm flails around with electric currents (impressive and gross physical effects), the dodgy doctor attracts the attention of arms dealer Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) who supplies cash for further experiments, a gothic tower to harness lightning and another psychological wound in the shape of his niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth). Dressed like a bird of paradise with a mind as sharp as her tongue, Elizabeth is betrothed to Victor’s little brother (Felix Kammerer) but her extraordinary empathy for others makes her an intrigue to the callous cadaver collector – and the heart of the story when she encounters the product of Frankenstein’s master work; the ‘monster’.
Ken Woroner/Netflix
Del Toro keeps audiences waiting an hour before the arrival of this patchwork creature made up of the dead from battlefields that he’s sawn, snapped and sliced asunder (also pleasingly gruesome). When he appears he’s a pale wraith with huge eyes, a cowering animal that can only utter one word. Buried beneath prosthetics that make him look like living alabaster, Jacob Elordi manages to convey a wide range of emotions with his singular utterance and a performance that lives in the physical. As Frankenstein commits the sins of the father, abusing his ‘son’ and punishing him for a lack of perfection, it’s clear who is the true monster in the scenario… Gorgeously designed – sets and costumes are painterly in detail, gothic and sumptuous – Frankenstein boasts some explosive set pieces that rival action movies and themes that still resonate with world politics all these years after Shelley first published. Just as then gods and monsters are often interchangeable, Man is the cruelest creature on earth, we are what we do and a powerful man hurling insults is often only describing himself. It’s a faithful – perhaps too faithful for some – adaptation with an awards journey that starts at Venice. It is, both literally and figuratively, bloody good.
Ken Woroner/Netflix
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of NETFLIX Frankenstein is in cinemas now Streams on Netflix from November 7
Luca Guadagnino’s latest is about cancel culture writ large – its opening titles recall Woody Allen and a bar jukebox plays Morrissey, while a philosophy lecture focuses on Foucault’s theory of a Panopticon state where all are under surveillance from society. Those under watch here are a group of intelligentsia; Alma (Julia Roberts) a Yale Yale philosophy professor hoping for tenure who is married to a snarky therapist, Fred (Michael Stuhlbarg), and friends with a flirty department colleague, Hank (Andrew Garfield). Alma, Fred notes, likes to surround herself with people who worship her on bended knee, so the faculty party at their elegant home is also attended by her starry-eyed PhD student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). Academia talk immediately turns gendered and political when Alma’s incoming promotion is questioned for whether she will get it for being worthy, or for being a woman. It’s against this primed beginning that Maggie makes an accusation of sexual assault against Hank, prompting a spiral of secrets, lies and social politics that will destroy careers. Especially as the school’s Dean of humanities admits to being ‘in the business of optics’…
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Directing a script by Nora Garrett, Guadagnino’s deliberately provocative film which provides no real answers focuses on hands as characters talk, confess and argue; as though their physical communication tells more truths than their verbal. With this much philosophising and privileged chatter there’s certainly plenty to unpack. And there’s numerous layers to the portrayal of each of the flawed players. Stuhlbarg, so good in Call Me By Your Name, continues to scene-steal with monologues from sofas as a surface-patient man who hides a bitterness and petulance from participating in a marriage that isn’t all it seems. Garfield’s turn from Byron-esque hot teacher to snivelling mess, and possibly worse, is a gradual disintegration that feels the most authentic, while Edebiri manages to sell the ethical twists required of her character, a rich girl whose entitlement is indiscriminate. Chloë Sevigny’s supporting role as a faculty therapist is a study in quiet betrayal.
Yannis Drakoulidis/Amazon MGM Studios
But the picture, unsurprisingly, is Roberts’. Dressed in Princess Di white jeans and blazer, her hair a blanching blonde, Alma, in her hands, is a switch-and-bait, a mystery, an ice queen and a woman dropping balls. Yes, she can eviscerate a student who questions her in class and tell the younger generation that ‘not everything is supposed to make you comfortable’, but she’s nursing a secret and an illness that are both incrementally weakening her. And she’s afraid of the consequences despite her philosophical filibustering. By turns Roberts is seductive, morally dubious, sympathetic and ultimately vibrates with rage. It’s the sort of compelling performance that awards bodies will likely recognise even if the film is difficult to parse. Garrett and Guadagnino are not interested in easy answers and their ambiguity frustrates as much as it intrigues.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios After the Huntpremiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival and is in cinemas now
Last year Yorgos Lanthimos bowed the divisive Kinds Of Kindness starring Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, an imprenetrable triptych that dared one to like it. At this year’s Venice Film Festival the trio debuted a linear, grimly funny and ultimately profound cosmic comedy that explores the horrors of humanity and the perception of powerful women.
Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features
‘Bugonia’ – though not explained by the film – is an ancient Mediterranean ritual where the carcass of an ox was believed to be able to recreate bee life. A death of a greater beast was required to give life to the pollinating, essential apinae. Lanthimos’ film begins with the bees, as Plemons’ Georgia warehouse worker and amateur apiarist, Teddy, describes their integral role in the world and the need to stop the poison that is killing them. As we watch Teddy prep himself and his sweet cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis, delightful) for the event they’re planning in their squalid farmhouse it becomes apparent that the duo subscribe to web conspiracy theories, are emotionally damaged by Teddy’s opioid-abusing mother (Alicia Silverstone) now being in a coma after a medical trial, and are intent on kidnapping big pharma CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone). Believing Fuller to be both responsible for the stasis of Teddy’s Mom and an alien from the Andromedea galaxy, the duo hope to save humanity with their plan – comedically doing yoga on filthy towels, shopping for Jennifer Aniston masks at Goodwill and chemically castrating themselves in order to be ‘neurologically free’.
Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features
Fuller is a precise businesswoman who complains about too much use of the word diversity in a diversity training video and mandates a 5.30pm clock-off time for her workers while also reminding them of the need to meet quotas. She wakes at 4.30am, trains ferociously, wears a stiletto-heeled daily uniform and appears to have no private life – an alien MO to the societal expectations of feminity. When she’s kidnapped by the duo (in a laugh-out-loud physical comedy sequence) and tied up in their basement she continually, coolly, asks for ‘dialogue’. And that’s what Lanthimos provides, as Teddy and Michelle verbally negotiate, power shifting forwards and backwards, audience belief in the truth flip-flopping with every turn. Is Teddy a delusional crackpot with abandonment issues? Or has this random man actually got a point?
Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features
Based on the 2003 film from South Korea, Save the Green Planet!, this is nonetheless a Lanthimos film, so darkness creeps into every facet of the process like the black mould seeping across Teddy’s kitchen ceiling. Teddy may not get his ‘news from the news’, but he is complex, bright and riddled with heartbreaking trauma (seen in weird monochrome flashbacks and hinted at by the local sheriff). Donny is driven by love and a need to escape his life, his compassion tempering Teddy’s more ruthless instincts as they torture Michelle. There’s an element of Ed Gein and some shocking blood splatter moments. Throughout though, there is humour and humanity; Plemons has never been better as the product of broken America while Stone’s large eyes (enhanced by a shaved head) and machine-gun cadence convince as both heartless CEO and credible ET. And the more dialogue the two engage in the more an audience is drawn in – not only to the ideological duel that demands a viewer take a stance, but to larger ideas of environmentalism, global accountancy and the sins of man. By the time the final reel is playing soundtracked by Peter, Paul and Mary’s plaintive ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ you have to agree with the refrain and sentiment; ‘when will they ever learn?’
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of FOCUS FEATURES Bugonia premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival and is in cinema’s now
Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer’s gentle ribbing of Hollywood begins with deliberate artifice: movie star Jay Kelly (Clooney leaning all the way into his public persona) is filming his martini shot on his latest flick, a death scene set on New York’s waterfront but actually carefully concocted in a Hollywood soundstage. As he utters his last line he asks for his co-star dog to come in later, and for another take. His team – Adam Sandler’s manager, Laura Dern’s publicist, Mortimer’s HMUA – flutter around him. But when he shuts himself in his trailer we see his interior life; one where he admits his existence doesn’t feel real, that he nurses regret, that ‘all my memories are movies’. After a failure to connect with his teen daughter (Grace Edwards) and a stinging meet-up with an old roommate (a scene-stealing Billy Crudup) Jay reassesses his cosseted, infantalised life, deciding to embark on european odyssey as he reflects on relationships with his neglected elder daughter (Riley Keogh, also bringing personal insight to her role), a co-star (Eve Hewson) and his acting class friend (Louis Partridge). Along the way there’s meltdowns, a lot of cheesecake, kookie Italians, central-casting Brits and a tone that veers between absurd and nostalgic, with nods to Fellini and Wild Strawberries. Baumbach deploys physical sets to interplay between present day and memory, and a heightened sense of realism that feels intentionally fake to reflect the inauthenticity that has crept into all aspects of Kelly’s life. Is his train ride through Italy really filled with morose German cyclists and cor blimey tourists or is this how he’s filtering it for a story on a late night talk show?
Peter Mountain/NetflixPeter Mountain/Netflix
Based on Baumbach and Mortimer’s own experiences in the film industry (they met when Mortimer’s son, Sam, starred in White Noise), Jay Kelly recalls other insider-baseball studies of Tinseltown (Entourage, The Player, The Studio) without particular bite. This is an affectionate look at coddled talent who say they are always ‘alone’ just as staff hand them a drink, the way that famous, wealthy people expect full commitment and loyalty from their entourage without giving it back, the disconnect of a star complaining how hard they work while living in a palatial mansion and travelling by private jet. When it’s the affable Clooney essaying such narcissism Kelly’s selfishness and black hole effect on his team’s lives reads as somewhat charming and unintentional. Dressed in perfectly pressed suits, that world famous crinkly smile hiding the pain beneath, Clooney walks a performance tightrope of showing everything while simultaneously holding back. A moment where he watches his real back catalogue of film manages to convey the wonder of cinema, the bewilderment of a star whose life is chronicled by projects, and the impressive career of Clooney to date. Aiding him in this endeavour is Sandler, rumpled perfection as manager Ron who facilitates, parents and apologises for his client while trying to juggle his own work/life balance. He has a minor love story with Dern but the real romance here is the one between Ron and Jay, both men having spent decades married to each other as a work family, missing out on personal commitments with their real nearest and dearest. And it’s seeing Jay through Sandler’s teary, loving eyes that helps us an audience connect with him despite his shortcomings. Though somewhat meta in its depiction of the star ecosystem, Jay Kelly is generalist in poking fun; at its best it showcases the finesse of its players. This is particularly true of Crudup who is masterful in a scene where he Method-reads a menu. Across the table, Clooney/Kelly’s eyes light up in delight at the magic trick performed in reciting entrees and it’s one of several moments that celebrate the artistry of cinema, as well as the sense of community and awe fostered in those who love to sit in the dark and watch it.
Peter Mountain/Netflix
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of Netflix Jay Kelly premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival and is in cinemas now
Screenwriters for seven 007 films, Robert Wade and Neal Purvis, consider the ‘proto-James Bond’ of Cary Grant’s gentleman spy in Hitchcock’s perfect cocktail of an espionage thriller.
HITCHCOCK’S BOND: NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) A great movie with a nonsensical title (there is no such official point on the compass). Most films you can rewatch with ease, dipping in and out. But with some, wherever you come in, you’re captured. You just have to stay for the next bit. And then the next. North by Northwest is precisely that movie.
The screenplay is terrific; lean and smart, with almost every character trading in understated but tack-sharp wit. Ernest Lehman wrote it when he and Hitchcock were blocked on another screenplay, TheWreck of the Mary Deare, for MGM. (As screenwriters, we know the feeling.)
Hitch had an itch he wanted to scratch – the image of someone hiding in Lincoln’s nose on Mount Rushmore, revealing themselves to their pursuers with a sneeze. Cute. It would be fun to think a whole movie grew out of that one idea, but in truth Lehman took some sketchy story bones Hitchcock had bought years before from a journalist at the New York Herald Tribune and conjured them into a bit of nonsense that made perfect sense.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
The most exquisite part is the premise of the FBI inventing a fictional master-spy in order to take suspicion off a real spy in play – and an innocent being mistaken for this non-existent person.
But living up to such a clever premise is not easy, and Lehman had a nightmarish journey, writing as they filmed, not knowing how the next part would resolve – exactly like the experience of Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in the movie. Perhaps that’s why it’s so compelling?
And perhaps that is the reason this film unites us two in admiration – because in writing seven James Bond films (for which North by Northwest is arguably the template) we’ve had a very similar experience. What happens next? How the hell do we get him out of this pickle? How do we make the next pickle bigger?
The character of Roger Thornhill is in so many ways the proto James Bond. Debonair, urbane, well-tailored, his casual air and ease with women marks him out as special – even if in this he is playing an ‘ordinary’ advertising guy. Thornhill is mistaken for a government agent named George Kaplan. Pursued by foreign spies across America, he navigates dangerous situations – from a deadly crop duster attack to a suspenseful climax atop Mount Rushmore – while uncovering layers of espionage and deception. Along the way, he falls for the mysterious Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), whose loyalties remain unclear until the film’s thrilling conclusion when she is revealed as a double agent. Ultimately, Thornhill transforms from an innocent victim into a resourceful hero, cleverly outwitting his pursuers.
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One of the two James Bond producers, Cubby Broccoli, was a good friend of Cary Grant. In 1959, the year Northby Northwest came out, Cubby asked Cary to be his best man – which Grant accepted. As Cubby then readied the first Bond movie, he asked Cary to play the lead – which he rejected. At 57, he was undoubtedly right to do that. He was already the age that Roger Moore would eventually retire from the role. Cary Grant’s given reason was he didn’t want a multi-movie deal.
But who could possibly have imagined that Dr No would spawn such a bullet-proof multi-movie series, a franchise, a genre, that’s still around more than 60 years later?
There’s no doubting the Bond franchise was heavily influenced by North by Northwest, though Hitchcock could well have been influenced himself by the Ian Fleming novels. Whatever, Fleming was a fan of Hitchcock and through his friend, the superb novelist Eric Ambler, asked if Hitchcock would direct the first James Bond film. His exact reply is not known – but the fact is… Hitch had already made his Bond movie.
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The comparisons are obvious. The extravagant title sequence courtesy of Saul Bass’ striking graphics, the villains, the girl, the espionage, the suspense, the witty lines, the gorgeous locations, the action, the sturdy soundtrack. The very look of Sean Connery even bears comparison with Cary Grant: the tan, the hair, the suits.
Dr No (1962) was filmed on a fairly small budget but the bigger-budget From Russia with Love (1963) was more clearly influenced by North by Northwest. Particularly the way it ‘homaged’ the crop duster action scene with its helicopter chase of Connery, using very similar shots to the plane chase.
And as fans 45 years later, when writing Casino Royale (also written with Paul Haggis), we dared to homage the train scene between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, aiming to capture some of their playful, sexually charged tone – with a tenser, competitive dynamic to the verbal sparring, reflecting the buried vulnerabilities of Bond (Daniel Craig) and Vesper (Eva Green). (It turned out this relationship became central to the arc of all of Craig’s Bond films).
Terence Young, who directed the early Bond films, admitted Hitchcock’s profound influence on his approach to Bond. And North by Northwest isn’t the only one in the mould. Neil Jordan believes Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) was the first Bond film, but we think you could go further back to The 39 Steps (1935), where Hitchcock altered the John Buchan book to include a new female character played by Madeleine Caroll, who is reluctantly forced on the run with Robert Donat by being handcuffed to him. Perhaps the earliest example of a Bond girl? Then there’s Notorious (1946) and To Catch a Thief (1955) – other movies with twists, glamour and espionage.
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But it is North by Northwest that perfected the cocktail.
It has been analysed to death. “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw,” speaketh Hamlet. Perhaps the films title references the confusing, blurred reality Hamlet was experiencing. So maybe not such a meaningless title after all? Then there’s the Freudian analysis, the Oedipal aspect of Thornhill’s relationship with his mother, the patriarchal symbolism of Mount Rushmore, and much more.
But what makes us keep watching is Hitchcock’s pulsating filmmaking; cinematography, dialogue, music, acting, narrative – all coalesce into the perfect entertainment vehicle, commanding our attention as we move forward from sequence to sequence. Even the corny aspects of the film (such as the back projection) acquire a fetishistic ‘rightness’. The suit, with its high-waisted trousers, is mesmerising. When Cary Grant calls housekeeping to have it sponged, a whole lost world is evoked. But of course it’s a brilliant plot device, to deprive our hero of dignity and agency (no trousers). Thornhill is both ‘other’ – who would think of having their suit ‘sponged’ – and disarming and relatable (he’s left in his underpants). The overall effect is that you just can’t stop watching Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill. Just like James Bond.
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Obviously the marriage of Cary Grant and Hitchcock was made in heaven, but this final blossoming may have come about for a rather unglamorous reason. When making Rear Window (1954) on a colossal set at Paramount, the studio simply didn’t have enough lights available, and ended up borrowing equipment from MGM in return for… Cary Grant.
Somehow that seems perfect.
And finally – and this will not go down well with any top directors reading it – despite the great Bernard Herrmann score to Vertigo, North by Northwest is the superior film. For all the symbolism in Vertigo, you really can’t top the train going into the tunnel at the end.
