A Comparison of Hitchcock’s Suspense in the Themes, Performances, and Visual Style of North by Northwest and Rear Window

Paper by Robert Hyde. Viewed on DVD.

Known as the “Master of Suspense,” Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock stands tall as one of the greatest filmmakers in the English-speaking world. He gave the filmmaking community brilliant artistic and technical innovations that set the stage for thousands of subsequent suspense and thriller films. Two of his most notable works, Rear Window and North by Northwest, spectacularly manifest his genuine, suspense-inducing approach to film production. The narrative films North by Northwest and Rear Window clearly reflect the mesmerizing, suspenseful themes of mistaken identity and voyeurism, classical and engaging acting, and spellbinding cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s motion pictures.

The themes of North by Northwest (1959) create an immediate mood of active, continual suspense. The themes of mistaken identity and deception are common in Hitchcock’s films, but North by Northwest takes the suspense that emanates from these themes to a new level. From the beginning, advertising agent and protagonist Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for CIA agent George Kaplan, even though this mystery spy does not actually exist. From the moment he is framed for murder to when he feigns death at Mt. Rushmore, Thornhill is forced to constantly play someone else, to assume the role of someone about whom he knows nothing, to become someone who does not even exist. The story’s main antagonist, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), also embodies the theme of mistaken identity because he initially introduces himself as the evil and foreboding “Lester Townsend.” Even Thornhill’s love interest, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), plays an deceptively hypnotic agent pretending to work for the men who want to kill Thornhill but who, in reality, works for the CIA. With characters playing those they are not, the audience is captivated by Hitchcock’s classical suspense genre themes. Viewers are engrossed with gripping questions from the first frame: Who are these people, why are they hiding who they actually are, and when will they be exposed or even killed by this veil of mistaken identity? As Robert Yanal writes:

The elusive Mr. Kaplan is a fiction among fictions – a character who doesn’t even fictionally exist. Yet spies attempt to kill Kaplan, and Thornhill, desperate to meet him, is almost killed by a machine-gun toting plane posing as a crop-duster (even mechanical objects have make-believe roles in North by Northwest). After his narrow escape, Thornhill returns to Chicago where he runs into Eve Kendall at her hotel, and plays another role, this time of the returning lover who only wants to be with his beloved, while she, too, plays a role as the solicitous girl friend who helps him out of his dusty suit and has it cleaned. Each seems vaguely aware that the other is playing a role though this awareness is kept to themselves (Yanal p. 70).

Nearly everyone seems to be playing a role of deception on top of their assigned role, and the lies and mistaken identity grab the viewers’ attention and concern for the results from throughout the film. This suspenseful, controlling idea of mistaken identity branches out into two other critical themes within the movie.
As North by Northwest deals chiefly with mistaken identity and deception, there is also another correlative theme of urgency that resonates throughout. The film embodies an active suspense of the hero constantly trying to hurry to clear his name and stop a villain. From the opening of the film, Thornhill is faced with the overwhelming urgency to hunt down and confront the non-existent George Kaplan. He frantically travels across a number of states in search of Kaplan, all the while avoiding death whenever he runs into Vandamm and his sinister plot. Thornhill has urgency thrust upon him as a race to find Kaplan is also a race to avoid Vandamm. Throughout the film, he is chased by cars, men on foot, an armed crop duster, and even a seductive, seemingly Mata Hari character, Eve. This epic series of pursuits is the main factor contributing to the suspenseful theme of urgency. But the film includes yet another theme, that of conformity.

This ironic and somewhat smaller theme in of conformity in North by Northwest contributes to the theme of mistaken identity and suspense by emphasizing the sameness of mankind. From the outset of the film on a New York City street or in the Oak Room Bar, Thornhill’s attire looks the same as every other businessman in 1950s America. It is ironic that, while Thornhill suffers from mistaken identity, Hitchcock has also made him look like everyone else in some scenes yet stand out as unique in others. No matter where suspense and urgency lead Thornhill in his race to find Kaplan and escape imminent danger, there seem to be crowds of people, large and small, that share similar characteristics. Most New York City residents in this film, including those on the street, in Grand Central Station, and at the UN, look like the generic 1950s businessman, which is how Thornhill is dressed throughout the film. He continues to wear the same gray suit and striped tie for the entire movie, which represents the sameness, the anonymity, and perhaps the insignificance of man on an individual level. Upon Thornhill’s arrival in Chicago, all the porters wear red hats, and he uses one of their disguises to blend in the crowd. After a pilot who attempts to kill Thornhill crashes into a truck, he tries to hide and become anonymous among a small group of similarly innocent Midwesterners who passively watch the incident. Thornhill faces the suspense of risk or danger whenever he is in a crowd, blending in or not (a gray business suit does not fit in at Mt. Rushmore), thereby reinforcing the theme of urgency. These four themes of North by Northwest contrast sharply with the themes found in Rear Window.

The themes of Rear Window (1954) compare similarly to North by Northwest with their gripping, Hitchcockian genre of suspense. However, Rear Window’s two major themes contrast with those in North by Northwest. In Rear Window, Hitchcock deals with the strong themes of voyeurism and a multifaceted sense of confinement, physically, professionally, and emotionally. Most of the film is viewed from the perspective of the injured battlefield photographer and protagonist, L. B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart), through his apartment window. Physically confined in a wheelchair and unable to travel for his career, he seems to have nothing to do but be a peeping tom to pass the time. His voyeurism sets him up for suspenseful, intense danger, however, when he spies on one neighbor, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), whom Jeff believes murdered Mrs. Thorwald. Jeff’s voyeuristic activities generate the flow of suspense as the viewer sees his imagination run amok. At first he just made up little tales to describe the lives of his fellow-apartment dwellers, but with Thorwald, he conjures up murder and is intent on proving it to his friends and the police. Those around him scold him for peeping until he is able to draw them into his “fantasy” of murder. The audience is equally captivated by the suspense of considering the gruesome murder and fully believes Jeff even before his friends do. The viewer is made to evaluate whether or not he agrees with voyeurism: Is it acceptable when voyeurism is used for good causes, or is it always morally reprehensible? Yanal comments, “Rear Window is a case study in peeping, complete with both philosophical dialogues on its pros and cons. In a sense, their peeping is ultimately justified….And yet their spying is not motivated by a desire to see the guilty punished but played as a kind of unseemly game” (Yanal 146).

The morality within the theme of voyeurism compares with the morality of deception in North by Northwest: Is deception ever morally acceptable, as when Eve lies to Thornhill about her true identity? Hitchcock often had an underlying component of morality – leaving the audience to choose for it or against it, creating conflict and suspense – within his themes. In addition to voyeurism, the theme of imprisonment is found in Rear Window.

Jeff finds himself confined in multiple respects. The film’s suspense continues when he keeps checking the time and counting down the days until the confinement of his cast ends. Jeff also finds himself trapped in a state of suspense when he expresses his fear of marital/emotional commitment to his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly). Jeff thinks that marriage is an imprisoning force he would intensely dislike. After spending the past few weeks watching his neighbors who have all different experiences with love and marriage, Jeff is definitely imprisoned by worries about which course his future marriage might take. Yanal states that “Marriage is constantly on this film’s mind.…Jeff threatens his editor to get him out of his two-room apartment or he’s going to do something ‘drastic’ – like get married” (Yanal 157). This theme of confinement contrasts with North by Northwest because in the latter film, Thornhill is often in the wide open spaces, whether in a corn field or on Mt. Rushmore. The theme compares, however, because it could be argued that Thornhill is confined emotionally by his mistaken identity, by his passion for Eve, and by tight train compartments, sports cars, or auction houses. Hitchcock’s themes within the genre of suspense overlap and interrelate across his films. The suspense is made up of tension in both films, and according to David Sterritt it is the “…one of the fundamental concerns of modern art: the tension between order and chaos” (Sterritt p.1). The suspense of both North by Northwest and Rear Window are also tangibly visible in the classical acting of the films’ stars.

Whether watching North by Northwest or Rear Window, it is apparent that both Cary Grant and James Stewart are the perfect combination of classical actors with the ability to sell movies. It goes without saying that Grant and Stewart were skillful actors, but they could also easily sell a film just by being cast in a leading role. Like contemporary stars, they were expected to play certain roles as well. When Cary Grant comes on screen, viewers expect to see him play a dashing hero – nice suit, clean haircut, square jaw, and all – trying to avert a crisis that somehow has impacted the plot with a smoothness, civility, and often glib sense of humor. Stewart typically plays a handsome character, too, and how he grapples with his characters’ fears grabs the audience’s attention since he, too, often creates a touch of humor in the midst of suspense. Back in the 1950s, Grant and Stewart were considered movie superstars and charming actors, two examples of the model whom every woman wanted and every man literally wanted to be like. The audience believes these actors in their roles, regardless of their being typecast, and the actors’ talents make it easy for the audiences to believe and get actively involved in their characters’ suspense-filled story lines. Guided by Hitchcock’s auteur perspective for these films, the actors smoothly convey all the thrills and drama needed to grab the audience by their fears and emotions. Nonetheless, there are differences in the acting in the two movies.

It is particularly curious that the stars of North by Northwest play roles within roles. Sterritt notes that “[Hitchcock] inflicts vulnerability on his characters by shifting the relationships between reality and illusion, often in settings that allude to stages or theaters…” (Sterritt p.1). According to Vandamm, Thornhill, while normally a humble advertising agent, plays the greatest variety of roles in the story, among them one man mistaken for another, a hero falsely accused of murder, a jealous lover, and then a pretend corpse. Vandamm repeatedly mentions how Thornhill seems to act as if he’s in a play. “‘With such expert play-acting you make this very room a theater,’ Vandamm tells him, though the crook himself has prepared the room for a performance by drawing its curtains against the sun on artificial light” (Yanal 69). Vandamm later tells Thornhill he is actually not a very good actor:
‘Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First, you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play a fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover, stung by jealousy and betrayal. Seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actor’s Studio’ (Yanal p. 70).

This acting within acting of North by Northwest brings Hitchcock’s audiences into the film and adds to the suspense: will the actors’ “acting” be seen through by their enemies? The actors carry out simultaneous roles to build suspense, the kind of suspense that causes viewers to question who these people on screen really are.

In Rear Window, the actors portray their characters more as everyday people, rather than needing false personae and disguise. As Jeff watches his neighbors, the stories he makes up for each of them is just a simple, direct snapshot of what the actors are portraying their lives to be, and he seems fairly accurate. The actors all make their characters seem normal, and the audience is initially accepting of this characterization. The only exception to this ordinary, natural portrayal of everyday city life is what happens in the Thorwald’s apartment. Perhaps Hitchcock feels murder is actually an everyday, run-of-the mill occurrence in New York. Burr certainly acts as if Thorwald is as ordinary as any of the other neighbors. Hitchcock asks the audience to believe that among the normal actions of the actors and the growing complications of their lives, evil is also normal. That is the perfect recipe for suspense. Susan Smith writes that:

“Hitchcock has realised that suspense cannot be produced in an instant, but must be built up carefully. We are ensnared gradually via curiosity, suspicion, apprehension and worry….the mounting tension is punctuated and deflated by a series of ‘disappointments’ (mainly arising from the detective Doyle’s provision of various pieces of evidence to discount Jeffries’ theory). Yet, arguably, these ultimately serve to heighten the tension even further by creating both frustration at the delay in solving the crime and unease over whether Jeffries’ suspicions are to be trusted…” (Smith 26).

A great deal of suspense in North by Northwest also comes in the film’s visual style. The mise-en-scene actively engages the eyes with an exhilarating arrangement of elements. At the beginning of the film, the angularity of New York City’s square buildings, presented at a Dutch angle during the opening credits, symbolizes the seriousness and urgency of living and working in the massive metropolis. It seems easy to be subjected to mistaken identity when every man, including Thornhill, dresses in a gray or black suit. The angularity continues into Chicago’s train station and into the lunch room near Mt. Rushmore. Out in more natural environments such as Indiana or South Dakota, the scenery looks more smooth and continuous, perhaps trying to lull the audience into a feeling that things here will be better. Yet they still create suspense by providing wide areas through which Thornhill runs wildly to evade danger. Hitchcock plays with the tempo of suspense: will it be rushed like the city, or deceptively subtle like in the countryside? According to Smith, “Many sequences…operate precisely on the basis of a tension between the studium and the punctum: between the general and the specific, the far and the near, the public and the private” (Smith 96). In North by Northwest, the tension between the two types of settings, rural and urban, heighten the suspense within the mise-en-scène.
A subtle element of mise-en-scene in North by Northwest is the visual portrayal of the hollowness of Thornhill’s executive life (failed marriages, living as a workaholic, rushing through life). Nicholas Haeffner writes:

For instance, on one level the ‘O’ in Roger O. Thornhill…is a sign of the emptiness at the heart of Thornhill’s existence. When asked what the ‘O’ stands for, Thornhill replies, ‘nothing’….Thornhill’s inability to cultivate lasting emotional relationships leaves a hole at the heart of his glamorous and successful existence (Haeffner 48).

It is possible to think of the “O” also as the circle that represents the path Thornhill takes in the film. His journey takes him from New York to Mt. Rushmore and ends on the train circling back to New York again. The use of the initial “O” as a symbol of a circular path in life and of emptiness, is a subtle but important piece of mise-en-scene in the film.

Another example of mise-en-scene includes the lighting of the women in the film, always soft and slightly blurry to give the illusion of a soft, harmless female character. This may be true of Thornhill’s mother, but it is deceptively misleading softness with Eve. She ends up being seen as good, but throughout most of the movie she is considered evil. The soft lighting and focus foreshadow that she will end up being good. This lighting is also found in Rear Window. Lisa is often the only focus of light on the screen in an otherwise dark apartment. It is Lisa who turns on the lights in the room, signifying she is the light in Jeff’s otherwise dark life. Her attire is often white, indicating purity, and her character seems quite pure an innocent. In North by Northwest, the female lead of Eve is often put in shadow, indicating deception and lack of clarity. Her attire is often red, indicating both the romantic tone of her character as well as the evil, devilish side she is forced to portray. Both films use color to portray good and evil, right and wrong, passion and suspense. Each also has noteworthy cinematography.

From the beginning to the end of North by Northwest, the cinematography makes the film as suspenseful a thrill ride as the world’s wildest roller coaster of 1959. Whether Thornhill is looking down from the top of the United Nations or the peak of Mt. Rushmore, these bird’s-eye view shots truly create “cliffhanging” suspense. Daylight scenes are usually shot with a deep depth of field, allowing both Thornhill and his surrounding environment to stay in clear focus. The extensive use of wide-angle shots gives the audience a feeling of the vastness of area he has to cover in his search for Kaplan, depicting almost a sense of helplessness that feeds the suspense. Close-up shots are successfully used when the audience needs to read the actors’ faces to try to get at the truth, or when romance develops. Often when the dialogue is intense, the camera cuts quickly among the actors to give a choppy sense of urgency and fear. In contrast, the cinematographic techniques in Rear Window are less choppy but equally suspenseful.

The visual element that stands out the most in Rear Window is its cinematography. Haeffner finds that “…the camera becomes a specialised tool for surveilling and spying – a high-tech prosthesis for Hitchcock, the coolly fascinated, analytical voyeur (Haeffner p. 37). Except for the climax of the film, when Jeff falls out of his apartment window, the film is shot mainly from his perspective, looking out across the courtyard or into his apartment. This unique angle turns the world outside Jeff’s apartment into a stage on which he watches the many variations of love and marriage. In Rear Window, the cinematography seems less rushed, less urgent, and with fewer quick cuts than in North by Northwest. Instead, it heavily uses the fade in/fade out technique. This seems to symbolize Jeff’s eyes opening and closing, the time passing, and the shutter of his camera’s lens. Nearly everything is shot from his visual point of view, using a great deal of eye line matches and matches-on-action, keeping a level camera angle all the while. Neil P. Hurley sees how Hitchcock’s own sense of claustrophobia is evoked throughout Rear Window when he says, “Hitchcock’s shorthand emotion for sin and disorder was fear.…Among the primal fears which concerned Hitch were those of space and height. He evoked claustrophobia…by deliberately, again and again, narrowing the conceptual focus of the audience: …in Rear Window through limited mobility and vision…” (Hurley 10). There are many more close-up shots in this film than in North by Northwest. Jeff’s apartment is tight, the neighbors are close, he feels confined, and he likes to look through his lens as a voyeur, all of which lead to numerous close-ups, signifying how closely he watches. One establishing shot of the community beyond Jeff’s apartment in the opening credits is all that is needed to give viewers an idea of the story world, and the subsequent close-ups fill in viewers on the necessary details. It is also interesting to note that, when the camera pans around the community to show Jeff’s neighbors doing what they normally do, this shot is one of the longest uninterrupted shots in the film. A clever in-camera effect comes into play when Thorwald finally confronts Jeff. Whenever Jeff uses a flash bulb to distract Thorwald, the camera cuts to Thorwald’s perspective and uses a fading light to signify the murderer being blinded by the flash effect. After the showdown, when the neighbors and police rally to save Jeff, there appears to be a brief segment of fast motion. The long shot technique from the opening credits repeats at the end of the movie when the camera circumnavigates the community to show how things have changed following the climax. The cinematography of North by Northwest and Rear Window are each joined together by a different set of editing techniques.

The editing in North by Northwest brilliantly adds to the active, constant suspense. The chase scenes consist mainly of short, choppy shots, and the dissolve transitions show that, theoretically, Thornhill remains restless in his adventure. During Thornhill’s attempt to spy on Vandamm at his South Dakota lair, the camera makes use of suspenseful cross-cutting to show that, while Vandamm and his cronies are having a conversation, Thornhill is sneaking around without their knowledge. At the end of the film, one of the most iconic graphic match cuts in film history occurs: when Thornhill pulls Kendall to safety on top of Mt. Rushmore, the camera cuts in mid-action to Thornhill pulling Kendall onto a train berth. How the hero helped his love interest the rest of the way down Mt. Rushmore is irrelevant at this point; once the audience knows that Kendall will not fall from the edge of the mountain, the camera can safely skip over the remainder of Thornhill’s efforts to save the day. Although most of the editing in North by Northwest builds suspense of wild proportions, the editing in Rear Window creates a suspense that looks smooth but still leaves audiences on the edges of their seats.

When it comes to editing, Rear Window builds up its own kind of suspense that appears smooth but reveals its full potential during the climax of the film. The shots are usually long, and the transitions in time fade in to black and out from black, showing a sort of ease and suggesting that Jeff has no trouble sleeping. He may be trapped in a claustrophobic environment, but he persists in spying on his neighbors to pass the time when he is not eating, sleeping, talking to Lisa, or being taken care of by his nurse. Only when Thorwald discovers that Jeff has been snooping around do the shots become shorter. As Thorwald creeps closer to Jeff with the intent of physical harm, the suspenseful shots become closer together until both the hero and the villain are both included in the same frame and tensions reach their peak. These are just a few of the countless editing techniques that leave audiences wondering and worrying when Jeff’s voyeurism will ultimately place him in danger.

From the themes, acting, and visual style of Rear Window and North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s mastery of suspense resonates. The way he produced such films helped him cope with his own fears such as mistaken identity, voyeurism, deception, and imprisonment, adding a small touch of wry humor along the way. His life itself was a suspense thriller, and he won the hearts of millions by making his worst nightmares into major motion pictures. Using themes to which audiences could easily relate, beloved actors, and film composition that was ahead of its time no matter what the decade, Hitchcock made the most of his suspenseful career.

Works Cited:

Haeffner, Nicholas. Alfred Hitchcock. Harlow, England: Pearson-Longman, 2005. Print.

Hurley, Neil P. Soul in Suspense: Hitchcock’s Fright and Delight. 1993. Print.

Smith, Susan. Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone. London: BFI Publishing, 2000. Print.

Sterritt, David. The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Print.

Yanal, Robert J. Hitchcock as Philosopher. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005. Print.