The BBC are showing Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, North by Northwest (1959). The film is basically a remake of Hitchcock’s earlier thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) but with the best title-sequence ever (Saul Bass), and with the best suit in cinema history…plus a proto-James Bond man-about-town hero witha bad case of mistaken identity. And a train…NYC to Chicago on the 20C Ltd.
Alfred Hitchcock was one of the great film directors of the 20C. He was born in England and enjoyed success at home and in America. Hitchcock’s career began in the silent era and continued until the 1970s. His professional career also included a stay in Berlin working at the UFA studios. This short, but important, period introduced Hitchcock to the potential of expressionistic feeling in film.
Hitchcock’s arrival in the USA, during 1939, gave him access to greater resources and to a global cinema audience. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Hitchcock observed America as an economic system and social organisation that promoted freedom but was, at the same time, deeply conservative and anxious. In addition, he observed that American mass-media provided a back-drop of justification for the American-way-of-life by constant appeal to Cold-War paranoia and psychoanalytical ideas derived from Freud. Hitchcock described these cultural polarities through the production of exaggerated feelings of fear and desire.
The concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis were incorporated into the world of US consumerism by Edward Bernays. Co-incidentally, Bernays was a member of Freud’s extended family.
During the 1950s, the idea of reality was re-conceptualised as a social and psychological construct. Academic research, Freudian psychoanalysis and the developing mass media combined, in America, to create a powerful force of normative formation.
The nascent US advertising industry used its influence, characterised as hidden persuasion, to fuel the development of consumer culture through emotional appeal. This association was promoted by the normative connection between products and feelings. The advertising industry became increasingly skillful in its manipulation of consumers by appeal to feelings of pleasure, desire, anxiety and guilt.
As Freud’s ideas gained popular currency, the film experience became increasingly understood as psychologically contiguous to voyeurism. The voyeuristic observer, hidden or otherwise, and marked with the obsessive-compulsive personality associated with sexual dysfunction, became a staple, not just for Hitchcock, but for the whole of cinema.
The link between cinema and psychoanalysis is well established. It’s enshrined in a whole body of theoretical work that devolves from the obvious association between the cinematic experience with dreams and voyeurism. The darkness of the cinema and the flickering experience of the film also correspond to our notions of memory and dreaming – both important aspects of the psych0analytical interpretation of the unconscious.
Hitchcock exploited the voyeuristic potential of film. The erotic potential associated with Hitchcock’s exploration of suspense was heightened by the director’s use of cool, elegant and blond-tinted actresses. Laura Mulvey has described the profound consequences of this alignment between psychoanalysis and the formal qualities of film.
The idea of the train was useful to Hitchcock as a visual symbol for a number of reasons. It was, first of all, widely familiar to all of his audience. Not so the car in 1935! It then had the great advantage of containing the action of the film. This constraint provided a creative challenge to Hitchcock at the same time as providing reassurance to the financial administrators of the production. Not only did the train contain the action of the film, it provided a scenic and cinematic backdrop through the train window. The slightly detached observation of the world, facilitated through the train window, was understood as analogous to the sensation of dreaming. The expression train of thought, gives credence to the associations between train travel, movement and feeling.
The established punctuality of railway services provided a readily understandable timeframe against which the action of the film could be played out. The time-pressure implicit in this sense of an unalterable timetable was a most effective device in creating a feeling of excitement, suspense and anxiety as good and bad play out along the tracks. Lastly, the speeding train gives the protagonists, and the audience, a powerful sense of unstoppable destiny. Obviously and because the train is roaring along the tracks, there is no escape from this destiny.
In addition to these possible meanings and associations, there are all of those usually associated with speed and large machines. The opulent luxury of the train, evident in the appointment of carriages, and the quality of service is implicit to the idea to international express travel. All this positions the protagonists within a narrative of money, power and politics. That’s sexy; which brings us back to Freud again.
The sleeping car, implicit in the experience of overnight travel, also provides a context of exciting pyjama-clad proximity for the personalities of the action. This is certainly the sub-text to the end of North by Northwest when Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint retire to their sleeping compartment. The train enters a tunnel, as the end titles begin, to make the Freudian connection with desire explicit.
Peter Wollen has described the psychoanalytical compound of excitement and desire that is evoked by the experience of speed. In the original expression of the theory, by Michael Balint, this applies specifically to the thrills of fair ground rides. For Balint, the thrill associated with speed is a form of auto-eroticism…
But, as Wollen shows, it can apply equally to the cinema image. A notion of speed is intrinsic to film – 24 frames a second – and the formal arrangement of storytelling in cinema has tended to foreground the sense of speed attaching to narrative progression. Wollen uses the example of Hitchcock’s profound expertise in relation to suspense in the thriller genre to make his case.
I consider Peter Wollen to be one of the most significant figures in the intellectual history of Britain in the last 50 years. Probably, up there with John Berger and Stuart Hall for a start. No one has heard of Wollen because he is a film-maker, not a literary or cultural theorist. Wollen is probably less well known than his former partner, Laura Mulvey, who is famous for revealing the implicit and gendered meanings that attach to the formal arrangements of film…
I first came across Peter Wollen’s name when I discovered, aged about 20, his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. I read it when I was about 24 (1982) and the book was already 14 years old! Like John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), it revealed a whole new way of looking at the world. Berger examined a number of aspects of modern image culture, including art and advertising. Peter Wollen was writing specifically about films.
You shouldn’t take all this theory of granted. Unless someone points out the different interpretations and meanings that attach to images; you just take them at face value, whatever that means. I guess that is what we are trying to find out.
Throughout the film and throughout his adventures, Cary Grant remains distinguished in his two-pice lightweight suit…tailored by Kilgour French, of London. The suit became the style guide for the Bond films and the man-about-town tailoring of various 1960s TV heroes (Steed especially).
By modern standards, the suit has a long drape, and combines British comfort with American styling. The jacket has a three-button front with the lapel folded down to provide the longer style opening of a two-button jacket. The jacket front is cut so that it should only be buttoned at the middle button. The tie and the waist-band of the trousers meet exactly where that middle button sits. Again, by modern standards, at a higher waist than we are used to now.
The jacket has a single vent that makes it look sporty, and the trousers have pleated fronts and turn-ups.
