directed by Alfred Hitchcock
written by Ernest Lehman

On the big screen! I strained to find details that I had never seen before; I wanted to believe that projected from real live film, the movie would seem newly rich and luxurious, that I would be seeing it “for real” for the first time. But of course I’ve seen it for real before. If anything, the image on the old print we saw was duller and muddier than the one on the DVD.

Furthermore, I’m not sure how much this movie benefits from the big-screen treatment, at this point in history. We all know that it’s a rollicking tale of adventure full of crazy spectacles – like a man being run down by an airplane! – but when it comes down to it, those few famous spectacles weren’t exactly characteristic of Hitchcock or of this movie as a whole. For me, the big screen accentuated not the excitement but the 1959-ness of a movie that, for pure sensory impact, can’t actually compete with any of the much, much more flamboyant movies made in the past 45 years. Somehow, on the small screen, I can still watch this movie and think it’s exciting without having to make any serious historical acommodations. On the big screen, I felt like the compact and almost stage-y quality of a lot of the movie had been stretched too thin. I was forced, to my dismay, to see some of it as exciting in an old-fashioned way, rather than simply as exciting.

Of course, my willingness to see North By Northwest as evergreen is only something I acquired at some point in my teenage years. I recall that when I first saw it, at a young age, I found some aspects so dated as to be inaccessible. The opening scenes, in particular, irritated me. “Why is he being such a jerk?” I asked my mother, as Cary Grant snapped and chattered smarmily at his secretary, lied to get a cab, and generally acted like a jerk. “He’s supposed to be funny and charming,” she told me. Well, now, of course, I see it that way. But there’s a fine line between insufferable and charming, and I guess I had to learn a few things about 1959 before I could know where to place that line.

Oddly, when I first saw it, I think the thing in the movie that most thoroughly impressed me was the moment when Cary rubs a pencil on a pad of paper to see the indentations left by a message written on the previous page. Nowadays, that moment strikes me as one of the goofier examples of Ernest Lehman’s penchant for treating cornball stuff like it’s incredibly clever. (“What possessed you to come blundering in here like this? Could it be an overpowering interest in art?” “Yes, the art of survival!”) But at the age of 10, or whatever I was, I thought that pad-and-pencil thing was great – just like Encyclopedia Brown! Nothing is cornball the first time around.*

Another reason I like seeing familiar movies with audiences is because it allows me to see the otherwise-hidden “laugh points” that define a movie’s rhythms. On the other hand, it can be isolating to see an audience laughing at something that has long since ceased, for you, to be laugh-related. I remember a filmmaker/teacher of mine once saying that she was always a little taken aback when she heard laughing in response to her film, because she had lived with it for so long that she had to think to remember why people were laughing. This is, interestingly, not at all the case with live theater, where the actors have to engage with the jokes every time they tell them. At least up to a point. Maybe in truly long-running shows, the performers start to feel like they’re performing some inscrutable ceremony, with responsory laughing as part of the text.

I remember being stunned when a friend, watching Raiders of the Lost Ark with me for what was, for her, the first time, laughed at the end of the opening sequence when it was revealed that Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes. I couldn’t believe I knew anyone who was still able to sniff out the truffle of that particular laugh, buried so deep under the pile of general cultural exposure. I felt something similar, on a smaller scale, when I watched North By Northwest with an audience.

Does it make me an anti-social creep that when the audience laughed heartily at “I feel heavyish. Put a note on my desk in the morning: ‘Think thin’,” I felt like something was going terribly wrong?

Another case of feeling anti-social: right after Mrs. Thornhill said “Roger, pay the two dollars!” the awful guy behind me leaned over to the girl he was with and said, in a little nerdy voice that you’ll have to imagine, “That later became a very famous line that people would say.”

To the degree that this guy was saying anything at all and not just grandstanding for his date, he got it wrong: “Pay the two dollars” is the refrain from an old vaudeville skit wherein a lawyer fights and fights a two-dollar fine for spitting until he gets his hapless client sentenced to death. This skit was apparently well-known (and appeared in the 1946 movie of the Ziegfeld Follies), and so we can assume that Roger’s fine is not, in fact, only two dollars – which would be beyond absurd, considering that he is being accused of stealing a car, driving drunk, and causing damage to a police car – but rather that Mrs. Thornhill is making reference to the line as a way of saying, simply, “just pay the fine instead of fighting and making it worse.” The punchline-y music, however, suggests that Bernard Herrmann, for one, didn’t understand the reference. Perhaps neither did Hitchcock. I just read online that Ernest Lehman talks about all this on his DVD commentary track, which comes as news to me. I thought I’d watched it all the way through but none of this sounds familiar. Guess I’d better watch it now.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I recently lucked into some unpublished movie score materials, including this beloved score. My reaction to seeing these notes on the page was just the opposite of my reaction to seeing John Williams’ scores; whereas there I was impressed by by how much thought and effort went into effects that are just barely noticed, here I thought, “wow, this music, which is so impressive in the movie, amounts to so little.” I’d known it before – in this movie in particular it’s really in your face – but it was really driven home: Bernard Herrmann just takes simple sequences and extends them to fill however much time is needed. You’d think that upon seeing the score, you’d find out that, sure, it’s based on a simple sequence but it’s been subtly adjusted to sync up with the movie. But nope. Most of the time, he just does his thing without making any accomodations to the screen action. Check out this cue (wherein Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau secretly confer right under Cary Grant’s nose by calling each other from opposite ends of a row of phone booths):

It’s truly, in every sense, musical wallpaper. And yet the effect is so strong, despite the utter indifference of this music to the specific action onscreen. Sometimes continuity, the mere impression of coherence and intentionality, can be the most important thing for music to impart to a movie. I already understood this principle and I was still taken aback by how incredibly bare this music is. Because the effect isn’t one of bareness at all; just as, in a room with patterned wallpaper, one almost never thinks, “this pattern is so spare!” Almost any pattern at all seems rich and enveloping.

Another thought about Bernard Herrmann: his style is the intersection of Richard Wagner and Aaron Copland. When you think about it, it’s amazing that those two composers even have an intersection, and Herrmann hits it consistently. I haven’t heard very much of Herrmann’s non-film output (in particular, he wrote an opera on Wuthering Heights), but it seems like his works didn’t come close to exhausting the potential of this particular stylistic niche, which is such a intriguing synthesis of the romantic and the anti-romantic. I’m not sure that’s a style that I personally would want to write in, but I’m be very curious to hear someone take a shot at it. I generally am attracted to styles that try to achieve a synthesis of sentiment and, simultaneously, disdain for sentiment. As are many people my age, I think. It’s in the air these days. And isn’t the score to Vertigo exactly that, in its way?

I think Stephen Sondheim said that in writing Sweeney Todd he took Bernard Herrmann’s style as a model…and that work has gone on to be seen as a uniquely successful high/low synthesis. Of course, Sondheim clearly thought of it as a kind of special trick, a pastiche, because he’s never really turned back to that style.** But it still seems ripe to me, as are most of the many rashly abandoned branches on the musical family tree. The question, as always, is not whether a style has inherent potential but whether you can talk people into listening to it. Sticking something in the background a movie is, of course, a good way to talk people into anything. As the Coca-Cola people will tell you.

* Nothing I can think of, at least. I’m only talking about cornball, here, not to be confused with kitsch, schlock, or trash.

** Well, maybe in Passion, sort of.