Category Archives: hiding in the cinematic closet

Sanitizing The Children’s Hour

Posted on by under blogathon, hiding in the cinematic closet, lit adaptations, we're here we're queer

 

By some accounts a champion of female independence, playwright Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), crafted some of the most searingly honest plays ever produced by an American writer, beginning with her debut, the heart-wrenching 1934 drama The Children’s Hour (which was inspired by a true story). The play tells the story of two women who work hard to make their dream of creating a successful school for girls a reality. Their dreams are dashed as Mary, a malicious child, creates a lie claiming that the women are lovers. As the rumor spreads and society turns against them, the school is abandoned and the two women’s lives destroyed. Hellman’s play is a moving story of the devastating effects of a lie and the consequences of bigotry. An innocent woman takes her own life, and a prejudiced society thereafter has her blood on its hands.

Lillian Hellman

The Children’s Hour was a very controversial play when it was originally performed, being banned in Boston, London, and Chicago on account of the subject matter of homosexuality. Producers did not believe that American audiences were ready for the supposed lesbian relationship found in this play. Instead, in 1936, they released These Three, an altered version of Hellman’s play. Although Hellman herself wrote the screenplay, and although many of the scenes are nearly identical to those in The Children’s Hour, much of the story’s strength is lost because of the changes that were required due to the rules of the Production Code. Unlike the original play (and the film version of The Children’s Hour later produced in 1961), These Three is centered around a rumor of a heterosexual love triangle. Karen and Joe are in love, but in this version, Martha is secretly in love with Joe as well.

THESE THREE (1936)

These Three lacks the passion evoked in The Children’s Hour. The 1936 version begins with the college graduation ceremony of Karen (Merle Oberon) and Martha (Miriam Hopkins, who would later appear in the 1961 film as Martha’s Aunt Lily). We see a hasty, seemingly spontaneous idea between the two to start a school for girls:

Karen: “What are you going to do?”

Martha: “I don’t know; teach somewhere I guess, if I can get a job.”

Karen: “Do you think I could teach?”

Martha: “Maybe we could find someplace together. Two well-educated young women, also neat and clean, wish position.”

Karen: “Martha, that farm of mine. I haven’t seen it in years, but it’s a lovely old place. I used to spend my summers there when I was a little girl. We could go there. Why not? Why shouldn’t we? We could work there … Martha, we might start a school, something of our own. We’d be good at it, too.”

In the next scene, the two women travel to the house that Karen has inherited from her grandmother. They find it in a dilapidated state, full of rats and bees. It is in this scene that we first meet Dr. Joe (Joel McCrea). He is in the process of tearing down the roof and ridding the house of bees. He explains that, on his days off from the hospital, he comes to the old house to make repairs, simply because he likes the house. He is not the owner, nor does he have any ties to the family or house. Nonetheless, somehow he (a complete stranger to the women) is able to convince Martha and Karen to restore the old house in order to start their school:

Joe: “You know, my place was just as bad as this, but it didn’t cost much to fix it. Much less than you’d think. Borrow a little money from the bank, and it’s fun doing it. So much fun I’d like to start all over again … You know, I used to do an operation at the hospital and then run home to paint the left side of the house.”

Martha: “We wouldn’t starve anyway, Karen, we’d always have free honey.”

Joe: “And free help. I’m a good carpenter, a good house painter, and good plumber.”

Both women fall in love with Joe as they work together restoring the house, but it is Karen who wins his heart. Martha does not let either party know of her affections for Joe until the very end.

In this version, malicious little Mary (Bonita Granville) creates a rumor that Martha and Dr. Joe have had “relations,” although he is engaged to Karen. Instead of Joe defending the two women, as in the original play, we instead find Karen defending Joe and Martha. Mrs. Tillford (Alma Kruger), the women’s benefactor and Mary’s grandmother, directs a speech to Karen, advising her to “clean her house.” In the scene where Karen and Joe part ways, it is Karen who asks Joe whether the lie is true or not. Although they still break up as in the play, the couple ends up happily together in the end, after the truth comes out.

The 1961 version of The Children’s Hour, on the other hand, is a much darker, intensely passionate film, and much closer to the original intent of Hellman’s play. While These Three has a lighter mood and happy ending, The Children’s Hour is nothing short of utter tragedy.

The film begins with a happy, serene setting. There are schoolgirls riding their bikes in a single file line, running along a serene pond in the sunshine, a sweet piano recital. From the very beginning, however, it is Malicious Mary (Karen Balkin) who ruins the otherwise heavenly scene by frightening one of her classmates.

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR (1961)

In The Children’s Hour, there is a sense of the hard work that Martha (Shirley MacLaine) and Karen (Audrey Hepburn) have put into making the school a success. Near the beginning of the film, Karen and Martha are found drying dishes together as they discuss their progress with the school. Martha announces that for the first time ever, they have had a profitable month. It is clear to the viewer that these two women have invested their lives into making this school successful. Karen notes at one point, “I may be hasty, but I think it’s here to stay … it’s almost too good to believe.” Unfortunately, this is a dream that will be destroyed as a result of a child’s selfish lie.

Although many parts of these two films are nearly identical, and both were directed by the legendary William Wyler, the effect of each on the viewer is drastically different. Is it a result of the changes in the storyline? Is it the acting quality? To become fully invested in a film, the viewer needs to feel a connection to the characters–something that is admittedly easier with the latter version. The warmth and love associated with friendship is evident between Hepburn and MacLaine. The feelings that Martha has for Karen are also hinted at multiple times throughout the film. When they earn money, Karen suggests that they save it. Martha insists that Karen use the money to buy new clothes: “You’re a Fifth Avenue, Rue de la Paix. You need to be kept up.” Martha reminisces about meeting Karen: “I remember how you used to dress in college. The first time I ever saw you, running across the quadrangle, your hair flying … I remember thinking, ‘What a pretty girl.’” The love between the two women, romantic or otherwise, is much more evident in this film version.

The Children’s Hour ends with the death of an innocent woman, driven to suicide as the consequence of a child’s wicked and hateful nature. It’s a brutal, and brutally honest, ending. It is the colossal sense of grief demonstrated in the film–and in the original play–that leaves such a drastic and ultimately more profound impact on the viewer than does These Three.

This post is the first of several contributions True Classics will be making to the Queer Blogathon this week. Co-hosted by Garbo Laughs and Pussy Goes Grrr, the blogathon will feature posts about LGBT issues, images, and themes in films both classic and modern. Make sure to check out the wonderful entries that will be posted on each site!

He just went gay all of a sudden.

Posted on by under blogathon, hahas, hiding in the cinematic closet, screwball legends, we're here we're queer

In the era of the Motion Picture Production Code, depictions of homosexuality were verboten, classified under the Code’s rather vague catch-all category of “sex perversion.” While those making films prior to 1934 enjoyed more freedom in their ability to depict some obvious—and even blatant—homosexual characters, the establishment of the Production Code Administration (PCA) put an end to such overt thematic elements in subsequent movies.

Savvy filmmakers, however, were largely undeterred by PCA restrictions, and continued to place coded gay characters and relationships in their movies. Though the depictions of these characters ranged from subtle to overtly brazen, they were still generally mild enough to slip past Joseph Breen, the rigid head of the PCA.

Over the years, directors and screenwriters working in the screwball genre of comedy seemed to take particular pleasure in thumbing their collective noses at Breen and his censorship cronies. Because the very notion of “screwball” was not to be taken seriously, the genre was able to depict people and themes that would have been heavily edited in (or completely excised from) more serious-minded movies. Therefore, screwball films, practically anarchic in their general reveling in utter chaos and confusion, were able to play with the conventions of male-female relationships, often inviting questions of gender reversal through cross-dressing motifs and, by extension, eliciting impressions of homosexual attraction—all in the interest of a few laughs.

Thus the idea of purported “gayness” became a comedic device for these types of films. The supposedly gay characters were not really gay—wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Rather, through a series of misunderstandings, these generally male characters were given some of the distinguishing “fey” hallmarks of the stereotypical homosexual person in an attempt to both undermine and ridicule the character because, as we all know, masculinity and gayness cannot coexist (this sadly speaks volumes toward the American public’s impression of homosexuality as something to be mocked rather than respected. To quote Mr. Billy Joel, the good ol’ days weren’t always good).

Some actors were more willing to throw themselves into such roles than others. The one that immediately comes to my mind is the always-accommodating Cary Grant. The actor was generally typecast as the debonair, suave, handsome, smooth-talking ladies’ man. But in several films, he eschews masculine dignity in the interest of soliciting laughs from his audience. And this only served to add fuel to the rumors that Grant was a closeted homosexual or, at the very least, bisexual.

It is generally accepted by many critics that Grant was the first actor to use the word “gay” in a homosexual context on film. In 1938′s Bringing Up Baby, when Grant’s character, David, accompanies Susan (Katharine Hepburn) and her leopard, Baby, to Connecticut, she convinces him to take a shower in order to delay his return to New York. While he showers, she steals his clothes and sends them into town to be cleaned. In dismay, David throws on Susan’s frilly, feather-trimmed robe and runs into Susan’s aunt (May Robson). Aunt Elizabeth, shocked to find a negligee-wearing man in her niece’s house, demands to know why he’s wearing women’s clothing, and an increasingly frustrated David finally leaps into the air, shouting, “Because I just went GAY all of a sudden!”

The book The Celluloid Closet (1981) claims that the line was ad-libbed by Grant and was not present in the original script by writers Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde. But there remains some debate about whether Grant actually meant “gay” in the homosexual sense, or whether he simply intended to imply the traditional, “happy” meaning of the word. According to Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia (2000), throughout the early twentieth century, the term “gay” served as a kind of code word by which homosexuals secretly identified themselves to one another while hiding their true sexual nature from others. The original meaning of the word was still the predominant one—witness the 1934 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film The Gay Divorcee. However, it seems naive to assume that, because the pejorative meaning of the word “gay” was not in widely popular use at the time, modern audiences are simply misunderstanding Grant’s intent. Regardless, the character isn’t really gay, but this brief outburst is the final blow that knocks David off his dignified pedestal and down to Susan’s own screwy level of behavior.

In 1940′s My Favorite Wife, Grant discovers that his long-lost wife, played by Irene Dunne, is still alive after having been shipwrecked on an island for seven years, accompanied only by handsome, well-cut hunk Randolph Scott. Upon first seeing the muscular Scott poolside, Grant’s eyes narrow in speculation; when Scott stands up and reveals his height and muscularity, Grant’s eyes widen and his body suddenly becomes ramrod-straight; when Scott sheds his robe, remaining in nothing more than a tiny pair of swim trunks, his toned physique causes Grant to appear overcome as he pulls out a handkerchief and nervously wipe his face. And as Scott swings on a set of rings, doing a series of back flips before diving gracefully into the water below, Grant watches with a mixture of appraisal and reluctant admiration.

Is it simple jealousy, or something more? In the context of the film, of course, we are not meant to read Grant’s character as gay; he is simply scoping out the competition to see what kind of man with whom his wife had spent seven years of solitude, and comes off seeming completely inadequate in comparison. But this vignette is particularly interesting in the context of Grant and Scott’s off-screen relationship. The pair were fast friends, having lived together, on and off, for more than a decade in a Malibu beach house popularly known in the press as “Bachelor Hall.” In fact, they were still living together at the time they made My Favorite Wife. But biographers and film historians dispute whether the relationship between the men was platonic or passionate, with some claiming the men were merely the best of friends, while others proclaim that Grant and Scott indulged in a years-long love affair. Neither man ever openly admitted to a relationship, so there’s really no telling whether or not there is any truth to the rumors. Perhaps Grant’s wide-ranging reactions to the overwhelming virility of Scott’s character may be an attempt to play with gossip-mongers everywhere—who knows?

Grant goes one step further in 1949′s I Was a Male War Bride, suffering the indignities of having to dress in drag just to get the chance to consummate his marriage to Ann Sheridan. When Grant’s French captain falls in love with Sheridan’s American lieutenant after a contentious and difficult road trip together, the couple must figure out how to get Grant into the United States so they can build their happily-ever-after together. After three different wedding ceremonies and a copious amount of bureaucratic nonsense—during all of which the couple cannot find time alone enough to consummate their union—the only solution seems to be to put Grant in a WAC uniform and hope for the best.

Grant makes for a seriously unattractive woman, and as you might imagine, the masquerade only works for about half a minute. The film is a series of emasculating events for Grant’s character, for Sheridan is, quite literally, in the driver’s seat throughout most of the film (seriously—he is not allowed to drive, so he must sit in the sidecar of Sheridan’s motorcycle). Grant is not coded as gay so much as he is ridiculed for stepping outside the bounds of traditional masculinity, even for such a brief moment. Originally, Grant intended to play the drag scene as overtly feminine before being convinced by director Howard Hawks to simply “act like a man in woman’s clothes.” And while Grant does indeed play it straight (so to speak), the entire scene seems to imply that the act of “drag” itself is somehow indicative of the Grant character’s “different” sexuality.

These are only three, Grant-specific examples of the screwball tendency to use stereotypical “gay” characteristics for the purposes of comedy. When Grant puts on his filmy negligee or his horse-hair wig, or when he evaluates Randolph Scott as though he were a choice side of beef, we are meant to laugh at the incongruity and Grant’s subsequent lack of dignity. After all, it’s not “real” gayness. It’s a put-on, an assumption based on popular beliefs about homosexual behavior that delve into generalization and misinterpretation.

This post is my contribution to the Queer Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs. She has vowed to continually update the list of participants throughout the day, so keep checking in to see what the truly amazing list of other contributing bloggers has to offer …

“I’m an advertising man, not a red herring.”

Posted on by under 5-star films, brandie's faves, hiding in the cinematic closet

Let me preface this post by saying that this movie—1959′s North by Northwest, one of my very favorite films from the erstwhile Master of Suspense—has been on my mind ever since Caroline over at Garbo Laughs announced her Queer Blogathon (which, incidentally, is next month—and if you haven’t already signed up to participate, you definitely should!). I thought about holding this review until June to coincide with the blogathon, but in the end decided to go ahead and post it now, since I will be discussing other themes in addition to the underlying homosexual tension involving the “bad guys” in the movie (just to give you a hint as to what’s ahead).

[Besides, I have an entirely different topic in mind for next month, involving a pretty man and lots of very pretty pictures. Hint: said man just so happens to be the star of this film.]

Perhaps more than any other film in Alfred Hitchcock’s extensive repertoire, North by Northwest encapsulates the combination of dark humor and perfectly-pitched suspense that so defined the director’s inimitable style. In this movie, all of the peripheral elements come together to make an engaging and ultimately thrilling chase film—and, in fact, N/NW remains one of the highlights of that particular cinematic sub-genre. Hitch’s efforts are helped mightily by a winning script, a fantastic score, and the peerless performances of a talented cast, led by the indelible Cary Grant.

Grant stars as Roger Thornhill, a successful New York advertising man who lands in the midst of a sticky case of mistaken identity. At a restaurant one day, two thugs mistake Roger for a man named George Kaplan and forcibly take him to a large house on Long Island. A man named Phillip Vandamm (a delightfully oily James Mason) questions Roger, refusing to believe that Roger is not Kaplan. He tells his trusted gunman, Leonard (Martin Landau) to eliminate “Kaplan,” and Roger is forced to drink a large amount of bourbon before being strapped into a car. However, he is stopped and arrested for drunk driving before he can do any damage to himself, though the police—and his own mother (Jessie Royce Landis, in a charming albeit brief performance)—don’t believe his story. Due to Vandamm’s machinations, Roger is framed for the murder of a United Nations diplomat and must go on the run. He decides to follow the trail of the mysterious Kaplan, hopping a train to Chicago, where he meets the alluring Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who offers to hide him in her private train compartment. But Roger doesn’t realize that the enticing young woman is Vandamm’s lover, and she’s under orders to ensure that “Kaplan” doesn’t make it out of Chicago alive.

Grant so thoroughly embodies Roger—effortless charm, dashing good looks, sly humor, and quick wits—that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Yet another Hitchcock favorite, James Stewart, was initially interested in the part. In the earliest drafts of the screenplay, the casting might have worked. But Ernest Lehman, the brilliant writer behind the screen adaptations of such classics as Sweet Smell of Success (1957), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), altered the original concept of the movie, ultimately rendering Stewart inappropriate for the role. Whereas Thornhill was originally going to be a traveling salesman—a sort of ordinary work-a-day figure, which befitted Stewart’s typical on-screen personality—Lehman changed the character to a more sophisticated advertising executive, a more worldly type of figure better suited to Grant’s inimitable style.

Grant and Stewart ultimately starred in four films each for Hitchcock: Grant in Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), and To Catch a Thief (1955) prior to this one, and Stewart in Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958). And each man naturally brought something very different to these films. Hitch took advantage of Stewart’s “everyman” persona by casting him in roles that are almost startlingly against type, thereby thwarting audience expectation of Stewart’s roles—instead of the stalwart “Boy Scouts” that virtually defined his career, these Hitchcock-flavored characters are men who are more anti-heroic than laudable. This is especially true in Rear Window, where Stewart’s gruff disaffectedness plays well against Grace Kelly’s luminous determination (who turns down Grace-freaking-Kelly?), or in Vertigo, where Stewart’s blind infatuation with Kim Novak becomes something utterly disturbing. Yet despite the grittier nature of Stewart’s roles for Hitchcock, every character is still relatively grounded, imbibed with the down-to-earth spirit that infused most of Stewart’s memorable roles throughout his career.

Grant, on the other hand, embodied the suave sophistication that many critics claimed was a reflection of how Hitch wished he himself could be perceived. Grant’s roles for the director shared a common vein of easy refinement—even when he’s playing a perceived wife-killer in Suspicion, or a true ass like Notorious‘ Devlin, Grant oozes a high-class appeal. His Hitchcockian characters are smooth, secretive, charming … and utterly devastating to the opposite sex. There’s nothing even remotely down-to-earth about them.

So imagine if Stewart had gotten his way and appeared as Thornhill in this movie. I think it’s safe to say that it would have been an entirely different film. And I think it’s also safe to say that it probably wouldn’t have been half as good. The success of North by Northwest rests on Grant’s performance as the proverbial fish out of water who nonetheless never loses his cool and doesn’t let the dire straits in which he has been so unceremoniously tossed disrupt his self-assured demeanor. The character is nothing if not urbane to the core. Even when facing danger, Roger Thornhill can still crack wise, can still cleverly maneuver his way out of trouble, and can still get the girl … all without mussing his well-coiffed hair or tearing his well-cut suit. Maybe it’s just me, but given the screenplay’s ultimate characterization of Thornhill, it’s hard to envision Stewart, who generally lacks that kind of sophisticated aura, successfully stepping into the man’s erudite, cultured shoes.

Hitchcock, for his part, realized that Stewart could not play the role as it had been rewritten, and was not above using a little manipulation to keep the actor out of the film. Hitchcock blamed Stewart’s aged appearance in part for the lackluster success of Vertigo, which had been released the previous year, and preferred Grant’s more “dignified” appearance for the character of Roger (despite the fact that Grant was actually older than Stewart!). Still, the director apparently did not want to hurt his frequent collaborator’s feelings. So in order to avoid having to tell Stewart point-blank that he could not have the role, Hitchcock instead put North by Northwest to the side until Stewart had signed on to star in another film, Anatomy of a Murder (1959). When Stewart had signed his ironclad contract, Hitchcock finally offered him the part of Roger Thornhill, knowing the actor would have to turn it down. Thereby, in one shrewd move, Hitch neatly avoided insulting Stewart while securing Grant for the role. They didn’t call him the “Master” for nothing, people.

The film was, at various points in time, known as The Man on Lincoln’s Nose (alluding to the climactic Mount Rushmore scene) and In a Northwesterly Direction (alluding to the film’s journey from New York across the Midwest to South Dakota), but MGM recommended North by Northwest as a temporary title, and that’s the one that stuck. This title is borrowed from a line in Shakespeare (English nerd alert!)—specifically, the tragedy Hamlet. Whether viewers were meant to recognize a link between the film and the play or not—whether, indeed, such a link was ever intended or not—the two stories nonetheless share an interesting theme. One of the biggest debates surrounding that play is the question of whether the young Prince of Denmark is mad or simply behaving that way in order to reveal the truth of his father’s death. Having been visited by his father’s ghost, who claims to have been murdered by his usurping brother, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, Hamlet decides to feign madness in his quest to uncover Claudius’ guilt. Some critics and readers have wondered over the years if Hamlet’s madness, effective as it is within the plot of the play, is all too real to be a mere act.

But in Act II, Hamlet reaffirms to old chums Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he is merely playing pretend, explaining, “I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is/southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw” (lines 361-362). In other words, he is merely an actor upon a stage, playing “mad” when it suits his aims, and embracing sanity in all other circumstances. And so, too, are the characters in North by Northwest ”playing”: Thornhill is forced to “take over” the role of George Kaplan if he wishes to find a way to survive; Vandamm plays the part of “good man” to the outside world, disguising his true nature to most; Eve must play a dual game to disguise her mission from Vandamm and hide her true feelings about Roger from both men.

In essence, each character acts out a series of lies throughout the film. But this is nothing new for any of them—Eve is a government agent (so lying is practically in her job description), while Vandamm is a career criminal. And even Roger, the ostensible hero of the film, engages in lies through his job as an advertising executive, though he is reluctant to label it as such. As he states to his secretary at the beginning of the movie, “Ah, Maggie, in the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only the expedient exaggeration. You ought to know that.” No one, not even one of the “good guys,” is exempt from mendacity in Hitchcock’s world view. In the context of the 1950s, this point of view is reflective of the broader attitudes at work in America during the Cold War, a time in which uncertainty was a constant way of life.

In a particularly “meta” moment in the film, during the auction house scene, Vandamm and Roger engage in a brief discussion of Roger’s “performance” thus far in the film:

Vandamm: Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover, stung by jealousy and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actor’s Studio.
Roger: Apparently, the only performance that will satisfy you is when I play dead.
Vandamm: Your very next role. You’ll be quite convincing, I assure you.

It’s an interesting moment—actors, embodying characters that are conceivably different from their “real” selves, draw attention to the artifice surrounding the act of performing … while they are performing. And it’s doubly interesting considering the context of Roger’s retort, which provides a heavy dose of foreshadowing, as Roger’s next “performance” will indeed be to “play dead” in order to relieve Vandamm’s growing suspicions of Eve.

The sense of artifice in the film is exacerbated by the use of a typical Hitchcock plot device known as the “MacGuffin.” As defined by the director, the MacGuffin is the ostensible center of a film’s plot, but its actual nature is typically undefined or unknown. Ultimately, the MacGuffin matters only as a means to motivate the characters’ actions and drive the plot forward. In North by Northwest, the MacGuffin is the microfilm hidden in Vandamm’s antique statue. But the secrets themselves are unimportant; the nature of the information contained in the microfilm is not revealed, nor does the audience really care what those secrets are. It just doesn’t matter. The screenplay pays a winking tribute to this during Thornhill’s initial conversation with the Professor (Leo G. Carroll, in the last of the six roles he would play for Hitchcock), in which Roger inquires as to what line of “business” Vandamm is in:

The Professor: Oh, you could say he [Vandamm] is a sort of importer/exporter.
Roger: Of what?
The Professor: Oh, government secrets, perhaps.

The Professor’s almost lackadaisical response tells the audience that our focus should not be on the microfilm, for the secrets themselves are superfluous. The vital factor here is not the exact contents of the information stolen by Vandamm; it is whether or not Roger will be able—and willing—to fully don the role of “Kaplan” in order to protect Eve’s cover.

And of course, we know he will, because Roger is infatuated with the woman almost against his will. Eve, the prototypical “cool Hitchcock blonde,” oozes sex from virtually every pore, yet still maintains that kind of detached bemusement that draws men like bees to honey. North by Northwest is, arguably, Hitchcock’s sexiest film; there is a vibrant thread of barely-suppressed sexuality that runs through most of the movie, prominently displayed in the smoldering attraction between Roger and Eve. Their initial conversation on board the train is filled with innuendos and rather bold, outright declarations of sexual interest:

Roger: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
Eve: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
Roger: She might find the idea objectionable.
Eve: Then again, she might not.

Though Roger is more than willing to engage in verbal games with Eve (and to attempt to do even more than that when she offers him refuge in her train car), her “betrayal” causes him to do an about-face. Ignoring his own behavior—and the implication throughout the film that he has spent many a night in the beds of any number of women—the ego-bruised Roger harshly judges Eve for “using sex like some people use a flyswatter,” labeling her a “tramp” (he, on the other hand, is merely a man, like any other man, only more so—to borrow a line from Casablanca). Of course, once the Professor explains that Eve was merely doing her job, Roger’s fit of pique is forgotten—she is once again a clean and shining figure of feminine virtue, and he dons the mantle of “white knight” in order to “save” her from having to “bed down” with Vandamm in the name of national security.

Interestingly, despite her position as the man’s lover, there is little perceived passion between Eve and Vandamm. In fact, their interactions with one another in the context of the film are almost businesslike, with little intimacy implied beyond their treasonous conspiracy. This is likely indicative of Eve’s true purpose, as she is responsible for infiltrating Vandamm’s operation and ultimately helping to bring him to justice through her efforts. But the lack of chemistry between Vandamm and Eve only serves to emphasize the homosexual undertones in his relationship with his right-hand man, Leonard.

Landau has openly admitted in the past that any hints of Leonard’s hidden homosexuality in the movie are completely intentional. In his performance, Landau deliberately chose to characterize Leonard as a closeted gay man whose desire to kill Eve Kendall was not entirely mercenary, but born out of jealousy of her sexual relationship with his boss. It was an inspired decision on the actor’s part, and it so impressed Lehman that he altered a key bit of dialogue to better highlight Leonard’s effeminacy. As Thornhill, unseen by the bad guys, watches from outside the window, a suspicious Leonard tries to convince Vandamm to leave Eve behind when he flees the country:

Leonard: You must have had some doubts about her yourself. You still do.
Vandamm: Rubbish.
Leonard: Why else would you have decided not to tell her that our little treasure here has a belly full of microfilm?
Vandamm: You seem to be trying to fill mine with rotten apples.
Leonard: Sometimes the truth does taste like a mouthful of worms.
Vandamm: The truth? I’ve heard nothing but innuendos.
Leonard: Call it my woman’s intuition, if you will. But I’ve never trusted neatness. Neatness is always the result of deliberate planning.

The term “woman’s intuition” is a deliberate addition on the part of Lehman, and Landau delivers the line with a barely-disguised, knowing smirk. Vandamm, for his part, catches the inherent envy at the heart of Leonard’s argument, even calling out his employee on his jealousy, claiming to be “touched” by Leonard’s concern. Though seemingly tongue-in-cheek, this response is Vandamm’s only indication that he fully understands the true nature of Leonard’s feelings for him—and that he doesn’t reject Leonard outright hints that perhaps Vandamm is himself bisexual (or, at the very least, accepting of his henchman’s “proclivities” … an almost unheard-of reaction to homosexuality for the relatively staid 1950s …).

As one might imagine, the Production Code office was none too happy about how “in touch” Leonard appeared to be with his feminine side. Obviously, Hitchcock couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Code, and in fact the director seems to have gone out of his way to goad the censors with his final product. Not only is the dialogue populated with double entendres, but the closing scene of the film features a lingering shot of a train barreling through a tunnel—an unrepentantly phallic (and utterly hilarious) image.

Underlying the action throughout the movie is Bernard Herrmann’s score, beautifully crafted to heighten the tension. Herrmann’s style is perfectly suited to the film, and in fact this was only one of several Hitchcock films scored by Herrmann—he also did the music for Vertigo, Psycho (1960), and Marnie (1964), among others. Herrmann’s work is particularly effective in the final scenes of the film on Mount Rushmore, as Roger and Eve scramble across the monument with Vandamm’s henchmen in hot pursuit and dangle from dizzying heights in their quest to escape.  But one of the wisest decisions in regards to the film’s soundtrack involves no music at all. In what is perhaps the movie’s most famous scene, Roger is pinned down in the middle of nowhere by a rogue crop-dusting plane. Rather than trying to build tension by scoring the scene with a crescendo of orchestral maneuvers, as some directors might have been tempted to do in similar circumstances, Hitchcock simply eliminates music altogether and instead relies on the ominous whine of the plane to fill the silence. In the process, the filmmaker creates an almost indescribable sense of dread that rivals even the creepy screech of violins from yet another iconic Hitch moment.

Though one of his more popular efforts, North by Northwest is not generally considered by critics to be Hitchcock’s “masterpiece.” [For that title, I would personally nominate 1943's Shadow of a Doubt and 1954's Rear Window, as I've stated in previous entries on this blog.] But N/NW is nonetheless one of the director’s strongest films, effortlessly combining humor and suspense to create a slick, engrossing thriller. It is, without a doubt, an endlessly entertaining movie, no matter how many times you watch it. The beauty of Hitchcock is how skillfully he builds layer upon layer of meaning while constructing his story, necessitating multiple viewings to capture all of the nuances of his vision. For film fans, that’s an invaluable quality, because each fresh viewing of the movie brings new perspectives and interpretations. And in the end, who wouldn’t love a film that presents you with something new every time you watch it?

This post is part of an ongoing countdown of Hitchcock’s twenty greatest films. North by Northwest is number four on that list. For other entries in this series, check out our category devoted to “Hitch.”