No hawks or hand-saws : Re-visiting North by Northwest (1959)

No hawks or hand-saws : Re-visiting North by Northwest (1959)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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31 July

No hawks or hand-saws : Re-visiting North by Northwest (1959)

When Valerian (Adam Williams) and Licht (Robert Ellenstein) spot Roger O. Thornhill leave The Plaza's Oak Room*, they immediately decide (seemingly for no better reason than that Kaplan's name has just been paged as Thornhill rose to go to make the call) that he is Kaplan.#NxNW

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 9, 2020

* To make a dutiful reminder to his mother about the theatre that night :

Maybe not untypical of mother / son relationships in other films that star Cary Grant, but Thornhill's attitudes towards marriage / divorce and women seem shaped by that with his (Jessie Royce Landis) ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 9, 2020

Jessie Royce Landis (as Clara Thornhill, Roger O. Thornhill's mother¹)

[...]

However, what we learn of Eve Kendall (if gender-assumptions misdirected us) causes N x NW to unfold into the jealousies of Devlin (Grant, again) for Alicia Huberman (Bergman, again) in Notorious (1946), in the dual role that she played towards Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 1, 2020

“I think the Academy ought to set aside a special award for Bergman every year whether she makes a picture or not!” - Cary Grant about Ingrid Bergman at the 1947 Academy Awards pic.twitter.com/WtivqvzQFC

— ingrid bergman source (@ingridbsource) July 18, 2020

[...]

¹ The spell-binding (versus The House of Dr Edwardes, the novel from which Ben Hecht, etc., worked (away)) is additionally of all of :

* Ballantyne, believing what Leo Carroll (Dr Murchison) wants

* Dr Alex Brülov (Michael Chekhov), desiring his old pupil

* We cinema-goers

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 1, 2020

End-notes :

¹ Though only a year separated Grant and her in age.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Short films at Festival Central (4) - Man in Fear (2011)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 December

* Contains spoilers *

Director / writer : Will Jewell

This film gives a delightful interchange between a constable manning a desk in the station (Tim Healy, credited by IMDb as Sargent (sic) Brown, though he does not, as I recollect, have a Sergeant’s stripes) and the film’s protagonist Anthony Fox (Luke Treadaway), which, whilst not literally at the centre of Man in Fear, at least gives us an insight into what Fox fears.

Not in a derivative way, I was reminded of a scene in Luc Besson’s Angel-A (2005), where a similar desperation leads André Moussah (Jamel Debbouze) to seek arrest in the cells as sanctuary (equally, there’s Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), but Healy’s PC was delightfully erudite, delightfully abrupt, and simply, in a superbly bluff British way, not willing to entertain what he was being told or what was done. (Not until afterwards, anyway.)

Beforehand, Treadaway brought us all the early fluster from North by Northwest (1959) of trying to prove the reality of what is happening to him, only to find that no one wants to listen, of being confronted by this PC who throws Damien Hirst and his suspended sharks in his face. In between, is the audience, to whom Fox's paranoia is palpable, and in whose hands - almost - his character’s fate seems to lie.

Much more so than Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), evading the fate of being Kaplan, Fox has a sense of vulnerability, of being – unsympathetically - thought to be in psychosis, when maybe his big overspilling bundle shows what he says…

A palpable playing with the borderline between being ‘in fear’ and what others will make of one’s fear, this film is a gem, given 9.0 on IMDb.


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