North by Northwest

TCM recently hosted a free showing of the film this week in Seattle with a Q&A between Robert Osborne and Eva Marie Saint before the show.  The Q&A itself was fine.  Saint was fun to listen to, but I felt like I heard a lot of information I already knew (in regards to Hitchcock).

Someone in the crowd asked her what she thought of this year's batch of Oscar-nominated movies, to which Saint praised The King's Speech (surprise surprise! she's OLD HAHAHAH).  She also thought Rush deserved to win supporting actor since the movie wouldn't have worked without said support. 

She also talked about the first time she and her husband tried to watch The Social Network.  She talked about how they felt dazed by the sheer speed of it and had to turn it off.  But they willed themselves to go back to it, because they considered it an important film because it was related to something that was very much a part of their children and grandchildren's lives.  And once they prepared themselves to really WATCH the film, they ended up loving it.  She praised Eisenberg's performance (as well as that of the entire cast).  I thought that was a pretty cool story, particularly because it was something that I had wondered about in the thread for the movie: how an older generation would react to the tech-vernacular as well as the speed in which it's delivered.

As for North By Northwest itself: obviously, it's a delight to watch.  I hadn't seen the film in a while, but I still remembered a lot about it.  The crowd (filled with people who are already fans of the film) was getting the biggest kicks out of Cary Grant's loose performance.

To be honest, I can't say that I'm thrilled by the film as a thriller anymore.  It's mostly just a pleasure to watch the performances, the screenplay, and Hitchcock at work.  But sequences like the 'drunk-driving-escape' (which I found ineffective even when I first saw it) end up being entertaining mostly for the goofy faces that Grant makes.  Even the film's iconic crop duster sequence or the Mt. Rushmore escape aren't particularly exciting to me now.

No, I think the biggest pleasures from this movie come from the small scale scenes of characters interacting.  "You gentlemen aren't REALLY trying to kill my son, are you? LOL!"  The lankily-standing-in-the-background menace of Martin Landau ("A libation!").  The exasperated villainy of James Mason.  His stone-faced henchmen (one of which I will now forever refer to as the "Christopher Nolan without facial hair"). 

And of course, there's Eva Marie Saint looking gorgeous and more than holding her own with Grant even coming in 40 minutes into the film (40 minutes is what Robert Osborne said it was).

And Hermann's score!

Also, I'd never realized the film featured so much rear-projection during scenes of walking exposition.  I'd never noticed till now and felt like a dork for not realizing it the previous times I had seen it.

When asked if the film had turned out as she had envisioned it when she read the script, Saint said it did.  Except when the film ended with the shot of the train going into the tunnel the night she saw the film for the first time, she whispered to her husband, "Well that's awfully Freudian..." 

To which he replied, "Yeah, you got it honey."