Traveling East by Northeast Pondering about North by Northwest
What is normal these darker days? This is probably the one questions no one wants to hear anymore in 2020. An almost empty flight from Frankfurt, Germany to Singapore is rather the normal. “One crew-member per passenger” one stewardess was joking bittersweet. Rather not so normal is it — at least to me — to find ‘North by Northwest’ by the thriller-virtuoso Alfred “Master of Suspense” Hitchcock on the inflight entertainment movie menu. I am a super-scared softie when it comes to thrillers, but Sir Hitchcock’s stories always fascinated me frenetically since childhood.
Feeling rather overwhelmed, alienated, and suffocated by the action-thriller movie output of the last years (the John Wick franchise being one of the very rare exceptions) — no intelligent compelling story-line, non-stop, and high-frequency noises, explosions, killing, shootings with the speed of sound, from the first second on until the last — my expectations are at an all-time low. Long story short, I was thrilled to get to enjoy an classic Hitchcock for a change.
I don’t want to re-tell the entire movie plot, for that there are better reviews written in the past six decades and even better you watch it yourself.
But why is it that the delicately threaded story-line with gallant and slightly — if not intentionally — clumsy Gary Grant, elegant, stunning and powerful Eva Marie Saint, menaceful, ice-cold and cunning James Mason, and the other characters, dwarf the fast-food quality-like productions we get sold as blockbusters today?
How entertainingly eloquent the ‘Art of Survival Scene’ during the auction? How totally twisting the ‘Framed for Murder Scene’? How charmingly cheesy the ‘I Like Your Flavor Scene’ — but still so genuinely lovely and lovable? The camera sometimes steady for double-digit seconds, the tensions visible in every wrinkle and perceptible in subtle sounds and noises. The build up with the buses until the chase for life and death starts in the ‘Crop Duster Scene’ ?
Of course, Hitchcock’s grotesque, brilliant and satiric imagination and wit is one-of-a kind. But 61 years passed since ‘North by Northwest has been released in 1959, imagine the limitations in technology, resources, and means available back then and how much more is technically possible.Which grand director today has the guts to pull up such fine feints woven in the story line constructing complex masterpiece as Hitchcock does? Only a few names come close. Too much fast-food served cold and overpriced.
So again, watch it: you’ll enjoy the entire 2 hours and 17 minutes. For a change. Ha, another normal: Everything changes in 2020 anyways. Maybe also your taste for movies. Fast-food is unhealthy.
