North by Northwest: Today's Movies Head South Far Too Often

    I watched Hitchcock's 1959 thriller "North by Northwest" in its entirety for the first time last night and, as usual, had a desire to write up something about it. That desire proved fleeting though. The movie is a fun spy romp through the United States, but ultimately a little lightweight, given the director. Even Hitchcock's "The Birds", a seemingly shallow horror movie, had more thematic heft as the film evoked an eerily prescient world where environmental dangers threatened to crash down upon us.

    Not so with "North by Northwest". Cary Grant plays an ad man mistaken by criminals for a government agent and mistaken by a young Eva Marie Saint as someone roughly her age. (The story goes that the actress playing Grant's mother was not even a full decade older than him). He is pursued across the nation, from Manhattan to Chicago to the U.N. Building to, finally, Mount Rushmore. The whole thing is pretty entertaining, but forgettable all the same. Maybe in 1959 the film felt like an exciting rush, but in 2012 where star-driven blockbusters come out each weekend it's all a bit old hat.

    This got me thinking. If this movie, made over fifty years ago, can effortlessly put on a show of slick entertainment, why are there so many bad mainstream thrillers today? Part of the answer is that Hitchcock seldom did wrong, but also, I think, that today's filmmakers mistake spectacle as automatically entertaining. "North by Northwest" supplies with an affable protagonist, funny dialogue, and some clever situations. The "Transformer" movies, "Terminator: Salvation", "Wrath of the Titans", "John Carter", "Battleship", and the "Underworld" movies are all examples of money just tossed at special effects departments despite how light on wit and intelligence the premise or script might be. Thought be damned, the studios say, people want to see loud noises and flashing lights.

    Of course, there have been bad movies around as long as there have been movies. But that's not the point. The point is that movie-making has been refined over the past century and built up into such a mammoth zillion-dollar industry that bad writing, producing and acting should not be in big budget productions. If something like say, "Battleship", can blow $100 million on marketing then why can't maybe 2 or 3 percent of that budget go to sharpening a screenplay? I don't really have an answer to that question.

    Coming full circle now, "North by Northwest" didn't have that kind of budget. God knows it probably wasn't cheap, but I suspect the Super Bowl ads for "John Carter" probably could have paid for the production two or three times over. Instead, it was just clever, diverting fun and when it was over, you didn't mind. But you also didn't feel cheated out of 12 dollars, either.