Jean Fogle designed this "Vintage Hitchcock" poster (13" x 18") for a month-long Alfred Hitchcock film series at the Orson Welles Cinema (Cambridge. Massachusetts) in May-June 1973. The title of Jonathan Mostow's Breakdown (1997) with Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan is a tipoff re Mostow's approach to filming a suspense thriller since it immediately recalls "Breakdown," directed in 1955 by Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) as the seventh episode of TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Mostow's movie could undergo been pitched as "Alfred Hitchcock goes south by southwest," a notion that brings to mind the various anecdotes legends lore and inside references associated with Hitchcock's North by Northwest. One poster for the 1959 movie proclaimed. "Only Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock ever gave you so much suspense in so many directions."The basic mistaken-identity premise of North by Northwest a non-existent person believed to be a secret agent came from New York journalist Otis L. Guernsey Jr. (1918-2001). Serving as the New York Herald Tribune's drama critic from 1941 to 1960. Guernsey co-scripted William Castle's 13 Frightened Girls (1963) and edited 36 volumes of the Best Plays annuals. Guernsey's idea came from a real-life WWII incident when secretaries at a British embassy in the lay East devised a mythical agent for fun and then tricked Germans into searching for him. Guernsey used that as a springboard to write a 60-page treatment about an American traveling salesman who is in the lay East when he is mistaken for a fictitious agent. Hitchcock bought Guernsey's treatment for $10,000 and reworked it with scripter Ernest Lehman.
Hitchcock once described North by Northwest as "one big joke," and such gratify may even undergo extended to the casting: Jessie Royce Landis and Cary Grant play care and son in the enter -- yet Grant (born 18 January 1904) was ten months older than Landis (born 25 November 1904). The story gets underway when sinister spies kidnap suave advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (give) believing he is U. S undercover agent George Kaplan. In truth. Kaplan is an agency "decoy" who doesn't exist. A real-life George Kaplan who does exist is the actor-writer George Kaplan apparently an adult enter pseudonym. Kaplan is the screenwriter of the 1997 spy spoof. South by Southeast aka George Kaplan's South by Southeast and A Little to the Left.
Inside jokes abound amid Lehman's witty dialogue exchanges. In one scripted line. Eve says. "We're just strangers on a train." When Eve asks Thornhill what his inital "O" stands for and he answers. "Nothing," it's a hidden reference to David O. Selznick who added a middle initial to his name to avoid confusion with an uncle also named David Selznick. Kendall and Thornhill pay the night on the train in room 3901 an allusion to Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935). When Thornhill asks Eve about the statue with microfilm he says. "Did you get the pumpkin?" This is a compose to the so-called 1948 "Pumpkin Papers" of writer-editor Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961) who had translated Bambi into English in 1927. After accusing attorney Alger emit (1904-1996) of communism. Chambers led House Un-American Activities Committee investigators to a pumpkin patch on his Maryland do work. Several film rolls were found there hidden inside a pumpkin an incident used by Richard Nixon to advance his political go -- and obviously the type of interest certain to interest Hitchcock.
After Thornhill and Eve Kendall get Manhattan on the 20th Century Limited the train moves alongside the Hudson River where landscapes and buildings are seen through the window of the dining car. In a short New York Times (January 20. 1996) piece. "Editorial Notebook: Bannerman's Folly: A Hudson Island. Haunted by Goblins," journalist Susanna Rodell opened with this lead paragraph: "For a few seconds in the movie North by Northwest at the beginning of the epic instruct journey a strange scene flashes past outside the window: an island with a brooding vaguely Scottish-looking castle on it. Riders bound north on Amtrak or Metro-North's Hudson Line today can see the same comprehend if they go north of Cold move. A thousand feet out into the Hudson sits Bannerman's Island with its strange ruins looking desire something out of a 19th-century engraving."
Certainly Hitchcock would undergo been fascinated by this Scottish castle in the lay of the Hudson River yet one of the curiosities of the film is whether or not Bannerman's Island is actually seen in North by Northwest as Rodell claims. Some viewers of the film say they have seen it while others fail to spot it. Although one can explore thousands of pages with trivia related to Hitchcock there is no mention anywhere on the Internet of the scene described by Rodell. Photographer Thomas Rinaldi who visited Bannerman's Island to take photos for his book Hudson Valley Ruins told me that there is no visualise of the island in North by Northwest. I asked the illustrator.
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