textfiles/magazines/HOE/hoe-0721.txt

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   ooooo   ooooo  .oooooo.  oooooooooooo       HOE E'ZINE RELEASE #721
   `888'   `888' d8P'  `Y8b `888'     `8   "Spies, Restaurants, and Laura's
    888     888 888      888 888           Mercedes: A Critical Non-Art-Fag
    888ooooo888 888      888 888oooo8        Review of Alfred Hitchcock's
    888     888 888      888 888    "            North By Northwest"
    888     888 `88b    d88' 888       o          by Big Daddy Bill
   o888o   o888o `Y8bood8P' o888ooooood8               7/6/99
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	This is the trouble with America, you know.  Going into a restaurant
 to have dinner with some friends and BOOM, you're mistaken for an
 international spy and abducted kicking and screaming.  Happens all the time.
 Don't you read the papers?  Man if only I could exaggerate sarcasm on paper!
 Personally, I've never been mistaken for a spy.  When secret agents come
 into a restaurant and call out some guy's name, I usually stay silent.  No
 way, I'm no fool.  Of course, it's not every day that secret agents come
 into a restaurant on a suspicion that a spy may be there.  The film North by
 Northwest, though packed with action and suspense, has a shaky plot.  Let me
 get this straight: top secret agents actually think that if they call out
 the name of a spy in a restaurant, he'll respond?  Give me a break.  Speed 2
 had a better plot.  I think Hitchcock tried to cover up holes in plot with
 excellent directing and mind reeling suspense, mixed in with good actors.

        A man named Roger Thornhill, the creme de la creme of success, enters
 a restaurant to meet up with business partners and is mistaken for a spy
 when the hit men have a busboy call out for George Kaplin.  So they snatch
 him up, while he wittily quips away, and take him to a large mansion,
 _letting him see the name of the owner_.  They sit him down, and while he
 denies being Kaplin, the Mr. Townsend (owner of the mansion, so it seems) is
 totally convinced he is George Kaplin, and won't take no for an answer.  So
 doing no checking, no proofing that he is George Kaplin, they hog tie him to
 the couch and make him squeal like a... wrong movie.  They force him down
 and make him drink bourbon.  A whole bottle!  Taking the poor drunken
 bastard to a cliff, they steal a car, slide him into the driver's seat and
 start driving him to the edge of the cliff.  (Drunk driving.  So malicious.)
 All the while, this horribly loud symphony beats on drums and attempts to
 play horns in time to the crack addicted percussion section.

	Suddenly, what drunks call a "moment of clarity" kicks in, just in
 time of course, when he's almost to the edge.  So far, all the pushing and
 shoving in the world couldn't move the lead hit man, but somehow, while
 under the influence, Thorney-baby shoves him post-haste from the car,
 speeding away into the darkness only to be picked up by a cop.  I wish cops
 today paid that much attention.

	Okay, so he gets lifted, prosecuted, and owes two dollars.  Still
 doing no research, the bad guys still think that he's Kaplin.  Thornhill 
 goes to the hotel that the bad guy told him he was staying at, and pays his
 loving mother fifteen dollars to get the room key.  Two dollars for driving
 drunk at a hundred miles an hour, fifteen to pay your mother off, what kind
 of society is this?

	They enter the room, and find out through the maid that no one has
 actually seen Kaplin.  No surprise, he's a spy, trained for that sort of
 thing, right?  So how was he found so easily at a restaurant, wining and
 dining his friends?  They can't find him through international search, with
 the best of the best searching for one man who registers everything under
 one name, yet they find him in a freaking dining hall?  Two words: yeah...
 right.

	So anyway, with this useless waste of time called a scene, they find
 out he's short and has good taste in fashion.  I thought all spies were
 tall, maybe just a stereotype.  They leave the room, but not before the main
 bad guy "A" calls him on the phone, just when they are about to exit.
 Getting the idea that hit men are almost to the room, he snatches Mother up
 and darts out the door, to the elevator, where the hit men wait for him.
 This is the part where the mother-instinct kicks in, and Mom asks a highly
 embarrassing question.  Not "Are you wearing clean under-roos?" but "You
 gentlemen aren't really trying to kill my son, are you?"  I can just imagine
 Roger whining and stamping his foot.  "Mom!  Don't embarrass me in front of
 my killers!"  He escapes them, by throwing mom to the wolves, and really
 that's the last time we ever hear of her.  What a good son.

	So he drives down to the UN building, because the wife told the cops
 that's where Townsend was.  Uh oh, Townsend isn't Townsend.  This guy is
 completely different.  So the bad guy is using a different name.  They start
 talking, and right before Thornhill is about to show him a picture of the
 fake Townsend, which he took from the hotel, the dude is knifed in the
 backside.  Apparently nobody saw a mysterious man throwing a knife clear
 across the room.  They guy dies in Thornhill's arms, and then he--get this--
 _removes the knife from the guy's back_!  Now that the guy is dead, all eyes
 turn on Thornhill as he his holding the bloody knife.  So now he's a
 murderer, too.

	Keeping a rational head any man would be proud of, he pulls the knife
 on an approaching man, warning him away.  Running out of the building to the
 train station, he hops on, the cops hot on his trail.  He meets a woman.
 She betrays him.  He finds out she's a double agent.  They end up at Mount
 Rushmore.  He pushes the hit man (no, he's not drunk this time) off the
 edge, and the homosexual secretary is shot in the back and some kind of
 microfilm is recovered.  Yada yada yada, happily ever after with the
 voluptuous blonde.  Fin.

	So the plot is horrid, okay, but Alfred Hitchcock is the bomb of
 directors with this authoritative control, the zooms and pans, close-ups of
 faces and shots high and low.  It makes me want to give him some kind of
 award.  Maybe I should hold a big meeting of directors and give them little
 golden statues for doing good work and making billions of dollars.  What?
 Someone does that?

	Cary Grant, with his shaky accent, speaks my favorite line in the
 movie: "No I did not borrow Laura's Mercedes!"  It sounds like, "Nu, I did
 not burro Laraa's Me-ce-des!"  This guy is a good actor with facial muscles
 and body movements, but go to speech therapy.  Eve Marie plays a good
 blonde, sexy, seductive double-agent, if there is such a type.  Martin
 Landau plays the obsessive woman-hating homosexual, though he is good at
 hiding it.  I think Mason, James Mason is excellent at setting the example
 for over-paid British bad buys and their stupid use of big words, and his
 obnoxious stuffy-nosed limey accent, saying lines like "Do stop playing
 games, Mr. Kaplin."  Jesse Royce... I saw her like four times, what do you
 want me to say?  Now, the Gardener/hit man should have gotten a name.  I
 guess the union requires you to speak at _least_ three words in a movie
 before actually getting recognized.

	So what I'm saying is, yeah, I liked the movie.  It's got great
 shots, wonderful use of authoritative directing, a nice rhythm and use of
 music, though really really loud and it doesn't sound like anybody actually
 played from sheet music.  But if you're looking for good action and
 suspense...

	I hear Speed 2 is out on video.

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 [ (c) !LA HOE REVOLUCION PRESS!     HOE #721 - BY: BIG DADDY BILL - 7/6/99 ]