Movie Exchange of the Day (“North by Northwest”)

Eve Kendall (played by Eva Marie Saint): “Roger O. Thornhill. What does the O stand for?” Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant): “Nothing.”—North by Northwest, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by Ernest Lehman (1959)

Offhand, I can’t remember a more entertaining comic thriller than Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, which premiered in New York on this date 50 years ago. Yet, as this brief exchange indicates, underneath the glittering surface are some of the director’s most profound questions about the dangerously elusive nature of identity.

Roger Thornhill works in advertising, a profession dedicated, as he wryly observed, to “elevated exaggeration,” since it acknowledges no such thing as lies. His two ex-wives have divorced him for “leading a dull life.” That makes it all too easy for him to be mistaken for “Mr. Kaplan” by suave villain James Mason.

Hitchcock had his own issues working out Thornhill’s persona. The genesis of the movie was an image of a character hanging from Mount Rushmore, giving rise to the director’s original proposed title: The Man in Lincoln’s Nose. It took lengthy sessions with screenwriter Ernest Lehman to flesh out the scenario of a man who became powerfully defined through action (including the famous crop-duster scene).

The title finally settled on for the film is far more evocative than the one originally conceived. It not only describes the geographic thrust of the plot, but subtly rephrases a line from another figure puzzling out matters of personal identity, Hamlet: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

This would be the first of two Hitchcock films in which a character’s initials signify the instability of identity. When Anthony Perkins disposes of Janet Leigh’s corpse in Psycho, he drives off in her car, which bears the license plate number NFB 418. The letters, of course, stand for Norman Francis Bates, the killer with mother issues that have finally overwhelmed his persona to murderous effect.