3. Hitchcock and Organization in “North by Northwest”

A review of the films of Alfred Hitchcock led me to conclude that he understood and used aspects of form to make films that excite and amaze. A comprehensive discussion of Hitchcock’s use of form is far beyond the scope of this blog so I will concentrate on one aspect: organization and its component parts—opening, development, and climax. I will limit this essay to one film, North by Northwest. (For those readers not familiar with the film, please view the theatrical trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbnKpiC4ZXM.)

North by Northwest is a systematic and linear progression of organized mini-narratives starting with the mistaken abduction of the protagonist, Roger Thornhill (an advertising executive played by Cary Grant), at New York’s Plaza Hotel and ending in a life-death struggle atop of Mt. Rushmore. To illustrate the film’s use of organization, I will examine one sequence: the crop duster attack. (The crop duster sequence is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbpUcAI86MY). 

1. Opening:  Thornhill, after arriving from Chicago by bus, stands alone on the roadside of vast, nearly barren, fields for an arranged meeting with a mysterious (actually non-existing) person know as George Kaplan. Alternating long shots of the fields and close-ups of Thornhill’s face heightened the scene’s emptiness and Thornhill’s bewilderment. Except for the swish of occasionally passing cars or trucks, the scene is silent, which enhanced its mysteriousness and emptiness. Thornhill engages in a terse exchange of words with a farmer waiting for a bus (“That’s funny, that plane dusting crops where there’s no crops”). The farmer boards a passing bus.

2. Development: The silence is broken by muted roar and sight of the crop duster far in the background. Close-up shots show a puzzled Thornhill as the plane approaches. The scene quickly transforms from one of mysterious tranquility to one of deadly shock as the plane swoops over Thornhill and attacks him with gunfire and insecticide powder. The scene effectively used rapidly alternating shots of the plane attacking Thornhill and his running through cornfields to evade the plane to produce an emotional draining action sequence.

3. Climax:  In the final scene, Thornhill runs onto the roadway and tries to stop an approaching tanker truck. In a matter of seconds, the truck knocks Thornhill down onto the road, the plane strikes the truck, and the truck explodes into an inferno. Thornhill escapes, hijacks a pickup truck left on the roadside by a passerby, and returns to Chicago.

A musical crescendo and fade out marked the closure the sequence.

The above example is illustrative of Hitchcock’s use of organization to carry a plot and story forward in an understandable, dramatic, suspenseful, and timeless fashion