Trading Places

One hundred years ago, two illustrious cinematic careers had their inceptions when Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks made their directorial debuts. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate that shared centennial than by focusing on another year, 1959, in which each delivered a box-office hit that epitomized his artistic preoccupations. For Hitchcock, it was North by Northwest, a wrong-man thriller that chases its protagonist, Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant), from Manhattan to Chicago and ultimately to South Dakota. For Hawks, it was Rio Bravo, a Western starring John Wayne as a sheriff who meets a challenge to law and order by collaborating with trusted allies, notably a showgirl (Angie Dickinson) who holds her own with the men around her, especially when it comes to repartee.

Though characteristic of their creators’ divergent sensibilities, each film included a crucial scene that might have come from the other’s playbook.

Hitchcock once called himself “a visual man [who] unfortunately … must have delineation of character and dialogue.” He strove to move his plots along with striking images. In The Lady Vanishes (1938), it’s a tea bag wrapper sticking to the outside of a train window, only to come loose and slip away just when the heroine (Margaret Lockwood) needs it to vouch for her credibility. In Strangers on a Train (1951), it’s the fingers of the deranged Bruno, played by Robert Walker, reaching deeper and deeper between the bars of a storm-sewer grate to retrieve an incriminating cigarette lighter. And at the end of North by Northwest, it’s a train barreling through a tunnel—a visual double entendre that makes clear what newlyweds Thornhill and Eve Kendall (played by Eva Marie Saint) are up to onboard.

Hitchcock gave plotting short shrift, often relying on what he called a MacGuffin, a physical item or ominous secret that catalyzes the action and then gets out of the way, a good example being the ordinary-looking bottles of wine in Notorious (1946) that in fact contain uranium ore. The hero (Grant again) and heroine (Ingrid Bergman) are spies, not physicists, so they don’t know exactly how the ore could lend itself to bomb making. But it’s what the bad guys are trying to keep hidden, thus providing the film’s thrust.

Early on, Howard Hawks prided himself on straightforward narration. In a 1956 interview, he said, “I try to tell a story as simply as possible with the camera at eye level.” Late in his career, though, he made the observation that “if you can keep [viewers] from knowing what the plot is you have a chance of holding their interest.” Interaction among the characters, he was willing to bet, would feed the audience’s hunger for narrative.

Hitchcock and Hawks had remarkably similar careers. They both maintained a stream of box-office hits from the 1930s to the late ’60s, thereby achieving a quasi-independence rare among Hollywood directors. For the most part, they got to pick the stories they told. They both took a bull-session approach to scriptwriting with their preferred writers. They cast Cary Grant as their leading man again and again—four times for Hitchcock, five for Hawks. They reserved the right to approve (or not) the final cut. They were snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which failed to award either director a competitive Oscar. And they were lionized by French directors—Jacques Becker, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, and others—whose auteur approach to film criticism depended heavily on Hitchcock’s and Hawks’s high level of control over every aspect of their movies.

In 1966, Truffaut published a book based on a series of interviews he conducted with Hitchcock. When the Frenchman brought up some critics’ tendency to label Hitch “a Catholic artist,” Hitchcock demurred, but his sometime colleague the producer John Houseman developed that theme in his memoir Unfinished Business: “I had heard of him as a fat man given to scabrous jokes. … What I was unprepared for was a man of exaggeratedly delicate sensibilities, marked by a harsh Catholic education and the scars from a social system against which he was in perpetual revolt and which had left him suspicious and vulnerable, alternatively docile and defiant.”

Hitchcock was born in 1899 to middle-class parents in London, where his father ran a greengrocery. The rod was not spared at St. Ignatius, the Jesuit school Hitchcock attended until the age of 14. For him, though, chastisement came less from the actual blows than from the anticipation of them. As he explained to Truffaut, if you misbehaved, you were told to “see the father when [the class was] over. He would then solemnly inscribe your name in the register, together with the … punishment to be inflicted, and you spent the whole day waiting for the sentence to be carried out.” On another occasion, Hitchcock mentioned that the offending student had a say in his punishment’s timing: He could get it over with right away or put it off, as young Alf was wont to do, until the end of the day.

In an interview with director Peter Bogdanovich, Hitchcock reckoned that the Jesuits taught him “organization, control and, to some degree, analysis.” But the most useful thing he got from the order was unintended: fruitful contact with harrowing suspense. The adult Hitchcock would decide if, when, and how that contact would be meted out to the characters in his films, and vicariously to the viewer.

After St. Ignatius, Hitchcock enrolled in an engineering school, then got his first job with an electric company. He studied painting after hours. Subsequently hired by a movie studio, he was put to work writing and designing the intertitles that provided dialogue and explanation for silent films. From there he moved on to scriptwriting and codirecting and then, in 1925, full-on directing. In his hands, tales rich in thrills became vehicles for experimenting with a medium that was still taking shape.

The family into which Howard Hawks was born in 1896 could have modeled for The Magnificent Ambersons, the wealthy clan in the 1918 Booth Tarkington novel of that name, later filmed by Orson Welles as his follow-up to Citizen Kane. Like the Ambersons, the Hawkses lorded it over an Indiana town, and biographer Todd McCarthy describes Howard and his brothers as growing up “pampered like American royalty.” Yet Hawks’s privileged background did not keep him from becoming an American Everyman. “Fortunately I have found that what I like, most people also like,” he said, “so I only have to let myself go and do what interests me.”

After dividing their time between the Midwest and California for some years, the Hawkses moved to suburban Los Angeles, where they remained for good. Howard’s secondary-school education included less than a year at Phillips Exeter Academy; he went on to study engineering at Cornell. He also learned to fly planes, and during World War I, he dropped out of college to teach that skill to members of the U.S. Signal Corps. Despite his truncated undergraduate record, Hawks received a degree from Cornell, in absentia, in 1918.

Entering the movies as a prop boy in 1917, he rose through the ranks to film cutter, story editor, and casting director. In 1925, he predicated his sale of a story to Fox Studio on being allowed to direct it, and The Road to Glory became the first of 40 Howard Hawks films.

Hitchcock’s formative years may have included encounters with the anatomy of suspense, but nothing in Hawks’s boyhood obviously presaged his own favorite subject as an adult artist: characters teaming up to undertake a perilous enterprise, such as an airborne delivery service in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), a cattle drive in Red River (1948), resistance to a rampaging alien from outer space in The Thing from Another World (1951), the defense of a Western town against a tyrannical gang in Rio Bravo, or the animal-trapping safari in Hatari! (1962). Rather, Hawks’s interest in that sort of thing probably came from joint ventures he took part in as a young man: flying, warring, even filmmaking itself.

In the summer of 1950, a literary agent received a letter from one of his clients, the novelist Raymond Chandler, who had so disliked working with Hitchcock on the script for the forthcoming Strangers on a Train that Chandler considered having his name dropped from the credits. “Hitchcock is a rather special kind of director,” Chandler noted. “He is always ready to sacrifice dramatic logic (insofar as it exists) for the sake of camera effect or a mood effect. … This is very hard on a writer.”

Seven years later, the much-in-demand Ernest Lehman signed up to write the script for Hitchcock’s next venture after Vertigo (1958), which had enjoyed only modest success with audiences and critics. (In the decades since, the movie’s reputation has grown to the point where it is now a perennial contender for greatest feature film ever made.) Lehman’s assignment was to adapt The Wreck of the Mary Deare, a novel by Hammond Innes, for the screen. Lehman soon realized, however, that neither he nor Hitchcock had much interest in the project. As an alternative, Lehman pitched what his biographer, Jon Krampner, calls “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures, something with wit, sophistication, excitement, and movement from one locale to another.”

Hitchcock was game, and behind the MGM functionaries’ backs, he and Lehman brainstormed for several giddy months. For example, when Hitchcock mentioned that he’d always wanted to stage a pursuit across the faces of Mount Rushmore, Lehman had to invent a reason for the major characters to end up there. He delivered the goods, though probably few viewers can recall offhand what drew Grant, Saint, and a villain played by Martin Landau out onto those presidential countenances at the same time.

The director and his writer also had to fool the studio heads, who thought they were getting a shipwreck flick. Hitchcock tried to make Lehman the messenger boy, but he balked. In one version of what happened next, Hitchcock gave the suits as much of the script as was down on paper, roughly 10 percent of the whole, and said, “Well, I have to run. See you at the premiere.” If true, it’s the sort of flippancy that probably no director but Hitchcock—or Hawks—could have gotten away with.

Deliciously outré as the Mount Rushmore set piece is—and North by Northwest consists of almost nothing but set pieces—even Hitchcock and Lehman restrained themselves at times for the sake of narrative coherence. Contemplated for the script but rejected as too far afield were an Arctic vignette in which an Eskimo fisherman pulls his line out of an ice hole to find that he has hooked a human hand, and a scene in which the camera follows a car down a factory assembly line until a foreman opens the door to the finished product and out falls a corpse. Unlike Chandler, Lehman enjoyed working with Hitch; 17 years later, they collaborated again on the latter’s final film, Family Plot.

Like North by Northwest, Rio Bravo originated as a thought experiment. In 1955, Hawks had had a rare misfire: Land of the Pharaohs, his first try at the widescreen spectacles designed to lure viewers away from their TV sets and back into theaters. Afterward Hawks went on an extended sojourn to Europe. On his return to the States almost four years later, he was struck by the profusion of Western series—Gunsmoke, Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel, and the like—on American television. A decade earlier, his first Western movie, Red River (starring John Wayne), had been a critical and box-office success, and Hawks made a proposal to Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros. Studio: a comeback with another Western. At first, Warner was leery—the very plethora of TV Westerns, he thought, might work against the picture—but when Hawks mentioned that the highly popular Wayne was on board again, Warner gave the green light.

Hawks got going with little more than an impulse to make an anti–High Noon. He had strongly disliked that 1952 film, in which Gary Cooper plays a sheriff who reacts to trouble in his town by canvassing for volunteers to help him combat it. Any lawman worth his badge, Hawks believed, would get the job done with help from a few reliable colleagues. (As John T. Chance, Wayne’s character in Rio Bravo, puts it, “If they’re really good, I’ll take them. If not, I’ll just have to take care of them.”) Hawks and screenwriters Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett fleshed out the director’s idea during long gabfests.

The film’s Hitchcockian first scene is a reminder that Hawks, like Hitch, started directing during the silent era. Following the credits, the action gets underway with Dean Martin’s character, Dude (though we don’t learn his and the rest of the characters’ names till later), tentatively opening a door to a saloon full of drinking men, entering warily, scuttling along a wall, putting one hand frequently to his mouth, and stopping next to a pillar. A black-hatted drinker at the bar (played by Claude Akins) thinks he knows what ails the newcomer: dire need of a drink. When the smiling Black Hat holds up his own drink, Dude nods. Black Hat takes out a coin, but instead of handing it over, he tosses it into the spittoon at Dude’s feet. Dude crouches and reaches into the spittoon to fish out the coin—thereby losing his dignity—when somebody kicks the spittoon away.

Looking up, Dude sees that it is Sheriff John T. Chance, now looming over him in disapproval and seen from below, who is responsible for the kicking. When Chance turns his back, the humiliated Dude grabs a piece of lumber and clubs him. A couple of barflies grab Dude and hold him steady while Black Hat punches him in the gut. Black Hat is about to inflict more blows when a bystander protests. Black Hat takes out his pistol, shoots the meddler, and walks out. The camera accompanies him to another joint, where he orders a drink. Enter Chance, a rivulet of blood drying on his cheek and his rifle pointed at Black Hat. Finally, almost four minutes into the film, Chance utters his first words: “That’s right, Joe, you’re under arrest.”

It’s a brilliantly economical opening, abetted by Hawks’s manipulation of familiar Western ingredients—the saloon setting, the pathetic town drunk, the villain in a black hat, the sudden outbreak of violence. Film critic Todd McCarthy has written that “the famous low-angle shot of Chance looking down at a groveling Dude, plus the camera tilt that underlines the connection between the men, were indicated in the script, although it is impossible to know who was behind this rare insertion of camera instructions in a Hawks screenplay.” Fond of narrating by image as Hitchcock was, he never started a movie with a medley of wordless actions as long and effective as this one.

Many of Hawks’s films—especially such comedies as Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), and Ball of Fire (1942)—feature verbal slanging matches between lippy characters, one male and the other female. His Girl Friday, in particular, may still hold the record for most rapid-fire dialogue in an English-language movie, with Rosalind Russell as the epitome of what critic Maria DiBattista called a fast-talking dame. Speed wasn’t always de rigueur, however. Hawks slowed down the badinage between veteran star Humphrey Bogart and newcomer Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944) to accentuate the film’s racy content. Audiences found the pair’s measured innuendo so appealing that a year later, Hawks complied with the studio’s request to inject more of the same into the second Bogie-Bacall vehicle, The Big Sleep.

Hitchcock had tried his hand at screwball comedy and its verbal duels in his Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), though with mediocre results. A couple of decades later, however, North by Northwest included what may be the most Hawksian scene in any Hitchcock movie. Roger Thornhill and Eve Kendall are seated together in a Chicago-bound railroad dining car, and soon they are bantering at an almost lazy pace:

THORNHILL: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending
I’ve no desire to make love to her.

KENDALL: What makes you think you have to conceal it?

THORNHILL: She might find the idea objectionable.

KENDALL: Then again, she might not.

THORNHILL: Think how lucky I am to have been seated here.

KENDALL: Luck had nothing to do with it.

THORNHILL: Fate?

KENDALL: I tipped the steward five dollars to seat you here if you should come in.

In the interview with Bogdanovich, Hawks explained his penchant for relationships in which the woman is the aggressor: “I do that on purpose every once in a while because it amuses people. … It allows you to make a scene that’s a little different. Hitchcock tried it in North by Northwest.”

Film historian David Thomson goes so far as to call North by Northwest a screwball comedy. He exaggerates, but the movie does have its wickedly funny moments, such as when the audience is made privy to a hush-hush meeting of the (fictional) United States Intelligence Agency to discuss a festering problem: Thornhill, an advertising executive, is being confused with an invented government operative named George Kaplan and is the object of a nationwide manhunt. “How could he be mistaken for George Kaplan,” one of the spooks scoffs, “when George Kaplan doesn’t even exist?”

The film’s MacGuffin, when Hitchcock gets around to dropping it in, is perfunctory. On an airport tarmac, Thornhill asks an intelligence maven known as The Professor (played by Leo G. Carroll) what the hell is going on. The explanation is drowned out by the propellers of an airplane preparing to whisk Thornhill away to Mount Rushmore, and that’s all we know until the MacGuffin finally materializes as a figurine stuffed with microfilm containing unspecified secrets. It is the pursuit of this figurine that nearly sends Thornhill and Kendall to their deaths on Mount Rushmore.

Hitch and Hawks both made themselves readily available for interviews, the best of which have been gathered by the University Press of Mississippi in a volume devoted to each director. But if either man ever mentioned having strayed from business as usual in his 1959 masterpiece—Hitchcock by staging a verbal jousting match in which the female knight takes the lead, Hawks by proving himself a master of muted storytelling—the comment seems to have gone unrecorded.

Great artists don’t hesitate to step out of their comfort zones as circumstances warrant, and there is nothing forced or awkward about the zonal departures in North by Northwest and Rio Bravo. I like to imagine Hitch and Hawks at the same Hollywood party toward the end of their shared comeback year. The two directors approach each other to offer mutual congrats. In the end, though, they content themselves with an exchange of knowing winks.