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I’m Jimmy Don Ventura, official film critic for the CMC blog.  Welcome to the very first review.

As the Captain pointed out in yesterday’s post, I’ll be bringing to you movie reviews based on the prominence of well placed classic automobiles and the effect they have on the overall movie.  I’ll be delving into the backstory, where applicable, and providing a fresh set of eyes on what Hollywood had to offer and why these films might be worth a second look, just to appreciate the cars involved.

The first film, North by Northwest is a damn good one to start with.  I’m goin’ out on a limb and speculating that Cary Grant did a better job than even my ol’ college buddy, Matthew McConaughey could have, had he been available in 1959. Fellow movie critics have suggested that N X NW may have been one of Hitchcock’s finest, and I’m not going to disagree, if for no other reason than the classic American iron presented in this mid century period piece, especially if you’re a Ford fan.

Before we even get into the cars on the Big Screen, let’s just get some of the questionable material out in the open, address it, and then sweep it under the damn rug once and for all.  The stars of the flick, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, were 55 and 35 years old, respectively, old enough for Grant to have been her father.  Making that situation worse, she was supposed to have been 26 in the movie, half the age of her love interest.  Complicating the whole age thing, Jessie Royce Landis, the actress playing Grant’s mother in the film, was only 62 when it was filmed.  That’s only seven years older than her supposed ‘son’.  It’s complicated.

But enough of the info you only get from being an insider such as myself.  Let’s get down to the point of this review.  I’m going to touch on a few vehicles outside the parameters I’ve been given because they’re important to the plot or the history of the movie.

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The very first scene shows Alfred Hitchcock attempting to get on a 1949 GMC TDH 4509 public bus.  This played into the continuing gag that “Hitch,” as we in the business like to call him, likes to insert himself into every film he made, just like New Guy inserts himself at the roundtable over at the Grounds for Divorce.  Also just like New Guy, he misses the bus.  But it provides a good shot at a means of transportation that used to be as common as dead possums on Highway 10, but are hardly ever seen anymore:  the city bus.

Shortly thereafter, we see the first of a damn near countless number of 1958 Fords show up in the movie.  I don’t know if Ford paid for product placement, if Hitch had a thing for the Blue Oval, or if the Ford rep was having coffee at the Plaza Hotel every morning with the crew, but you can’t swing a dead cat around your head three times without hitting a 1958 Ford in this movie.

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Most every taxi in New York city, where the movie starts out, is a 1958 Ford.  The police in every town that serves as a setting for the film all drive 1958 Fords.  In a plot device of Hirchcockian mistaken identity, the Cary Grant character, Roger Thornhill, finds himself swept up in a case of mistaken identity and in the back of a 1958 Cadillac Fleetwood 75 limousine and whisked to the country estate of the antagonist of the film, Phillip Vandamm, played with somber nuances by James Mason.

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After not being given the information they are looking for, Vandamm finds it necessary to instruct his right hand man, Leonard, to dispose of Thornhill.  Leonard, who sports communist leanings that seem to drive the plot as well as homosexual feelings for Vandamm that are never explained. He figures the best way to get rid of Thornhill is to force him to get drunk by pouring a bottle of whisky down his throat and put him behind the wheel of a new 1959 Mercedes-Benz 220S Cabriolet and point him towards the edge of a cliff.  Would it have been easier to just shoot him?  Hell yes, but then you have no movie.

I’m just gonna be straight up and tell you that the plot line isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds.  I’ve known one or two people who wanted to drive their own new Mercedes off a cliff.  But most of them are smart enough to go with gummies rather than hard liquor, and pay the help to actually do the deed rather than risk their picture showing up on the front page of the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch.  (Don’t miss my review of the new Nicole Kidman flick, BABYGIRL, in the STD this weekend.)

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So Thornhill is just barely conscious enough to avoid the edge of the cliff and eventually makes his way to Glen Cove.  He narrowly avoids a 1958 Edsel Corsair Hardtop Sedan, a 1958 Mercury Monterey, and a 1957 Ford Ranch Wagon.  Viewers can only deduce that Glen Cove only has one new car dealer and it has to be a Ford-Edsel-Mercury franchise.  Glen Cove police soon take him into custody in the back of a, well, you know what.

When his mother comes to bail Thornhill out, nobody at the station asks why she appears to be about the same age as her son.

Thornhill, now knee deep in plot twists, mistaken identity, and obviously hung over, winds up at the United Nations building in a 1958 Ford taxi and is photographed pulling the knife out of an Ambassador’s back.  Though he is not the one who placed it there, he feels like it would be the smartest thing to do to pull it out in front of a crowd.  (A poor decision repeated by Pee Wee Herman 32 years later.)   New York is a tough place to be, anytime.  During the height of the Cold War it had to be even tougher.

Our hero winds up on a train where he stumbles into our femme fatale, Eve Kendall played by Eva Marie Saint.  Because he is Cary Grant and she is blond and this is Hollywood, sparks fly.  Leo G. Carroll plays a character so high up in the CIA that the only name he is ever given is The Professor.  “The Professor” was a last minute change from “Cornfield Dave” at the insistence of the legal department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who feared lawsuits.

The whole lot of them make their way across America in a “north by northwest” direction setting up the two most pivotal scenes of the entire film.  Eve hides the fact from Roger that she is really the kept woman of the bad guy, Vandamm.  Leonard hides the fact that he really has the hots for his boss.  The Professor hides the fact that he and Cornfield Dave had been involved in more international incidents than any two single human beings other than Hillary Clinton and Pablo Escobar.  Thornhill makes sure no one suspects that his mother was seven when she gave birth to him.

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Things come to a slow boil as Thornhill finds himself in Indiana waiting to make contact with an unknown person who can make sense of everything.  Well, everything except his mother’s age.  Nine minutes of the film are dedicated to this location and what unfolds.  Of course, viewers don’t suspect that the location is actually outside Bakersfield, because that is where the scenes were shot.

A 1950 Flxible Visicoach, a few random cars, and eventually a crop dusting plane make an appearance.  The crop-duster is not a good sign for Thoornhill.  It is an even worse sign for the 1951 White-Freightliner WH-64 that it eventually crashes into.  The resulting explosion is hotter than the backseat of a teenager’s car when Bikini Beach is playing out at the Prairie View Twin Drive-In.

Somehow, that leads to Rapid City, South Dakota, an auction house, and the confrontation between Thornhill and Eve when he discovers she is really in the relationship with Vandamm that Leonard would like to be in.  This leads to another arrest, where Thornhill is taken into custody in a 1958 Ford black & white.  Poor Roger Thornhill has seen the backseats of more old Fords than Trixie over at the Klip-N-Dye at this point.

But that leads everyone to the climax of the whole plot line that takes place on the faces of the presidents on Mount Rushmore.  Just prior to that, the climax of the automobiles used in this Cold War caper happens as well.  Eve shoots Roger in the cafeteria of the monument, then flees the scene in a 1958 Continental Mark III convertible.  From an automotive standpoint, a blonde bombshell using such an iconic car to flee a murder right under the stone noses of four past presidents doesn’t get any better.  One can only imagine what ol’ Abe was thinking as he saw the Lincoln pulling out of the lot.

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Of course, Eve didn’t really shoot Roger, just like her Continental wasn’t really a Lincoln.  It was part of the separate Continental Division created for 1956 and not absorbed back into Lincoln until a year or two later.  They would meet up amongst the pine trees somewhere near Mount Rushmore for one more scene with Eve, Roger, her ’58 Mark III and the 1956 Chevrolet 210 ambulance used to carry away the “mortally wounded” Thornhill could take place.  Roger thinks they’ll live happily ever after. Eve knows they’ll never see each other again. The Professor knows their fate is as doomed as the Continental Division.  She drives off one more time, spinning pine needles on Roger’s shoes.  She accepts her fate as a double agent as a burly Forest Service employee knocks out Roger with one punch.

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There’s only one more car of any significance to appear before the final of the movie, a 1952 Ford sedan at the home of Vandamm not too far from the monument.  The Ford sedan is as nondescript as Vandamm’s house is fake.  The interior shots of the house were filmed on a soundstage in Hollywood; the exterior shots of the house are cinematic trickery using pretty effective drawings rather than any real house.

Likewise, none of the actors or characters ever stepped foot on the actual Mount Rushmore in the climax scene.  Buddies in the industry told me the US Government wouldn’t allow such a defacing of government property.  (Little did they know what lay ahead.)  Reproductions of sections of the presidents’ heads were made on a sound stage for filming.

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In one more example of the government having its heavy hand in the making of the film, Hitchcock was also not able to show Roger and Eve getting into bed together at the very conclusion of the film as they are on their way back to New York by train.  Censors feared that people would assume these two unmarried adults were about to engage in unblessed copulation.

Hitchcock, once again proving he was a master genius of film making, filmed an alternate ending with the long, phallic-like train they were on entering a tight, dark tunnel as the movie ended.  Infinitely more effective, I’d say.

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Overall, I would say the overly heavy-handed use of 1958 Ford sedans could have caused the end result to seem forced.  But with the sprinkling in of various other vehicles and the masterstroke of the Continental Mark III at the monument created much needed balance.  The 1949 Mercury parked next to the Mark III explicitly pointed out to the viewer how much progress had been made in only a handful of years.  It boldly proclaimed, “We’ve already won the damn Cold War!  Look at how far we’ve come.”

I give this movie an automotive score of 10 out of 10.

This is your CMC Movie Critic, Jimmy Don Ventura, signing off till next time.

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