the invisible third
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | the invisible third |
| Original title | North by Northwest |
.jpg) | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1959 |
| length | 136 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 (re-examination) |
| Rod | |
| Director | Alfred Hitchcock |
| script | Ernest Lehman |
| production |
Herbert Coleman , Alfred Hitchcock for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| music | Bernard Herrmann |
| camera | Robert Burks |
| cut | George Tomasini |
| occupation | |
| |
The Invisible Third (original title North by Northwest ) is an American thriller that was shot in 1959 by Alfred Hitchcock based on a script by Ernest Lehman . A harmless advertising man is embroiled in a murderous secret service scheme and flees across the United States. The Invisible Third is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most popular films.
action
The New York advertising executive Roger Thornhill is during a business meeting at the Plaza intercepted -Hotel by armed men when he just wants to make phone calls. The gangsters mistake him for a man named George Kaplan, whom they called specifically on the phone. Thornhill is loaded into a car at gunpoint and taken to a mansion on Long Island , the address and owner of which he can identify on an open envelope. A well-dressed man then enters the room without introducing himself, accompanied by a secretary, and Thornhill is asked to cooperate with them. Thornhill is strictly against this. He doesn't know what the men want from him at all. The kidnappers do not believe his assurances that he is not a chaplain. Eventually they forcibly give him bourbon , put him in a stolen car and want it to roll over a cliff.
But Thornhill is able to flee by car despite his drunkenness and is arrested by the police in front of the persecuting gangsters. The judge, before whom he stands the next morning, doesn't believe his story, especially since his mother stabs him in the back with open disapproval of his way of life. Thornhill sets out to find those responsible. It turns out that nobody, including the Plaza hotel staff, has apparently seen George Kaplan. There is no evidence of his description in the villa. Thornhill learns that he can meet the villa owner at the UN and drives to the UN main building . But before the unsuspecting Townsend Thornhill can give him clues, he is killed by a knife in front of many people present. Thornhill is wrongly believed to be the murderer. Now he's not only on the run from the gangsters, but also from the police. Desperate, he decides to continue following in Kaplan's trail. He makes his way to Grand Central Terminal .
During a CIA meeting , George Kaplan is called an invention, a non-existent spy intended to divert the attention of the other side from the actual informer. In order not to endanger their own agent, the CIA does not step in and leaves Thornhill to his own devices on his escape.
On the train to Chicago , Thornhill meets young Eve Kendall, an attractive, self-assured woman who hides him in her compartment from the police and starts a love affair with him. At the destination she seems repellent, but arranges a telephone meeting with Kaplan for him at a bus stop in the country. There Thornhill escapes the attacks of a spray plane with luck . Back in town, he learns that Kaplan has checked out of his hotel before the alleged phone call. Eve, whom he sees there, apparently doesn't want to know anything more about him, but inadvertently leads him to an art auction , where he meets the mysterious stranger from the villa again. He learns his name "Vandamm" and discovers that Eve is his girlfriend. Jealously he reveals Eve's behavior on the train. To escape Vandamm's helpers who want to kill him, Thornhill disrupts the auction process and is taken away by the police. However, he is not driven to the nearest office, but to the airport on a telephone order. There the "professor" awaits him, a CIA officer who explains the true connections to him: Eve Kendall, Vandamm's lover, was recruited by the US secret service and is supposed to provide valuable information about his espionage organization. Thornhill put her in a dangerous position with his scene.
To help her, Thornhill agrees to continue playing his role. In a restaurant, contrary to her feelings, Eve shows that she has had enough of Thornhill's advances and shoots him in front of Vandamm's eyes with blank cartridges. This is intended to induce Eve to take Eve with him on his next trip abroad, during which he is supposed to deliver espionage material, in order to protect her from the police. But shortly before departure, Leonard reveals the fraud to Vandamm, whereupon he decides to throw Eve off the plane. Thornhill, who secretly overheard the conversation between them, is able to save Eve at the last minute. Together they flee to the nearby Mount Rushmore National Memorial with a small statue, the hiding place for the espionage material . Two of the pursuers can throw Thornhill into the depths, and when Leonard takes the statue and is on the verge of crashing Thornhill and Eve, he is shot by the police. The scene is changed abruptly and Thornhill and Eve find themselves - now as a married couple - in the sleeping car of a train. They kiss and the train goes into a narrow tunnel.
Staging and reception
Hitchcock and his screenwriter Ernest Lehman conceived The Invisible Third as a sequence of adventures that the protagonist, Roger O. Thornhill, embodied by Grant, must endure in search of the solution to the riddle. As in Hitchcock's earlier films The 39 Steps (1935) and Saboteurs (1942), the likeable male hero gets caught up in a wild escape story that drives him across the country. Similar to Saboteure , the showdown takes place at a US symbol: if it was the Statue of Liberty in the 1940s film , it is now the Mount Rushmore National Memorial .
The adventures are lined up with no major transitions. In each of these scenes, Thornhill takes center stage. Only once in the course of more than two hours does the event briefly turn away from him, when after about a third of the film the audience is cleared up about the true connections in a meeting at the CIA. Hitchcock first used this stylistic device of seamless stringing together of individual dramaturgical highlights in The 39 Steps , which is also regarded as the predecessor of The Invisible Third .
With The Invisible Third , Alfred Hitchcock has directed one of his lightest and most humorous spy films. The lightness and elegance of this film have influenced many films made afterwards, not least the James Bond films made in the 1960s and the Indiana Jones films. The Invisible Third was Hitchcock's last mostly cheerful film for a long time.
Individual relevant scenes and sequences
Many individual scenes and episodes of the film served in the following decades as templates for scenes in adventure and crime films by other directors.
No filming permit for the UN headquarters
There are legends surrounding some scenes, some of which were brought into the world by Hitchcock himself. So Hitchcock wanted to shoot the murder scene at the UN directly in the UN headquarters in New York , but he did not get permission to film. Over the past few decades it has repeatedly been reported that Hitchcock then filmed with a hidden camera (and always at the risk of being discovered) inside the building and used these recordings in the film. In fact, photos were only taken inside the building by employees disguised as tourists, on the basis of which the lobby was reconstructed in the studio. The only take that was filmed at the original location (it was taken from a truck across the street) is a long shot showing Cary Grant entering the building. It was not until almost 40 years later that a feature film was allowed to be shot for the first time inside the UN building. Director Sydney Pollack shot takes for Die Dolmetscherin there in 2004 .
The "corn field
scene " A scene that is often referenced and copied - one of the most famous Hitchcock scenes of all - is the so-called "corn field scene". Trapped by Eve Kendall, Thornhill stands on a lonely country lane in the middle of the prairie , waiting for an alleged date. At first, almost nothing happens for five minutes. Through the choice of perspective and the cut, the viewer participates in the tense expectation and in Thornhill's skepticism. A pest control plane turns out to be a threat to him. It flies very close over him and a machine gun is shot at him from the plane. Thornhill first fled to a nearby corn field. The double-decker drops its pesticide on top of him, whereupon Thornhill escapes back onto the road and tries to stop a truck. He is almost run over by this. The double-decker finally crashes into the tank truck and explodes.
With this scene, Hitchcock contradicts a film cliché that was prevalent until then , according to which a threatening situation requires an equally threatening environment: a gloomy place and a confusing scenery. The cornfield scene is often cited as particularly exemplary of Hitchcock's precise way of working with storyboards . In fact, it was filmed without one. The supposed storyboard drawings for North by Northwest were only made afterwards for advertising purposes.
The "film bug" scene
Although Hitchcock was considered very meticulous, he still made a - now legendary - film error (" blooper "): When Eve Kendall appears to shoot Thornhill in the last third of the film, a little boy has been in the background for seconds in anticipation of the loud bang Close his ears before the shot, although he knows nothing of Eve's intention and cannot see the gun from his angle.
Idea for a scene that wasn't filmed
Hitchcock wanted to shoot another scene at a Detroit auto plant. In a long, uncut shot, Cary Grant and a second person walk along an assembly line on which a car is being completely assembled, starting with the first screw. At the end of the scene, they open the door of the car that has just been completed and a corpse falls out, precisely the person they were talking about for the last minute. By realistic standards this is impossible, from a dramaturgical point of view it is a thought that illustrates Hitchcock's ideas of how reality should be transcended. Hitchcock eventually dropped the idea, unsure how to incorporate it into the film.
The scene at Mount Rushmore
Also known is the escape of Eve and Thornhill over the stone presidential heads of the monument of Mount Rushmore towards the end of the film. The Mount Rushmore Park Administration only gave their filming permission on the condition that the scenes at the memorial should not be brutal. What they saw in the final, they found to be too violent and asked to be removed from the starting titles, where they were thanked for the cooperation. As usual, many of these shots were shot on paper mache mountains in the studio.
Final scene and censorship
The final scene of The Invisible Third was Hitchcock's greatest victory over the censorship of the time. After Cary Grant has pulled Eva Marie Saint upstairs into the bed of a sleeping car (although he necessarily intervenes a marriage with his address "Misses Thornhill"), the two kiss. There is a cut and in the last scene of the film you can see a train speeding into a narrow dark tunnel. This is, as Bill Krohn put it in Hitchcock at Work , the most explicit description of the sexual act in a US film during the production code era . Hitchcock himself called it "the most impertinent final shot I've ever done."
Cameo
Since his film The Tenant, Alfred Hitchcock regularly made a short, silent cameo appearance in his films, partly out of superstition . Here - at the end of the opening credits , just as his own name was mentioned in the opening credits - he missed a bus. Since he knew that the movie buffs were waiting for his short appearance in his films, he planned it relatively early at the beginning so that the audience should "have it behind them" and could concentrate on the film.
background
This thriller is regarded as the summary of the American films Hitchcock, in which the director juggles the typical elements of his earlier films. It is Hitchcock's last film with Cary Grant and Grant's most famous film.
It is Hitchcock's last film in VistaVision , the only widescreen process used by Hitchcock . With a length of 136 minutes in the cinema version, it is Hitchcock's longest feature film. The studio initially insisted on shortening the film, which was felt to be too long, but Hitchcock was able to avert this with reference to a contractual clause.
The original title of North By Northwest , refers unlike the homonymous final words of the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley , not Shakespeare's Hamlet . Rather, In a North-Westerly Direction was one of the working titles of the film - it roughly referred to the direction in which the action shifted geographically in the course of the film. The shortening to North By Northwest was an idea of an employee of the production company MGM . Northwest Airlines is also used when departing Chicago .
Jessie Royce Landis , who plays Cary Grant's mother in The Invisible Third , was just seven years older than him in real life (she was 62, he was 55). Hitchcock used a comparably curious mother-son line-up in Infamous with "mother" Leopoldine Konstantin , who was only four years older than "son" Claude Rains .
Leo G. Carroll is involved for the sixth time as an actor in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock through his appearance as head of the secret service in The Invisible Third . This makes him the actor with the most speaking roles in Hitchcock films. He plays a parody of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover in the film , which continues in a parody of Hoover's secretary Helen Gandy as Mrs. Finlay (played by Madge Kennedy ).
At the beginning of the film, Roger Thornhill is kidnapped and driven to a country house by Vandamm's henchmen. There Thornhill is put under alcohol and then sent out onto the street. The country estate where these scenes were filmed is part of a public park called Old Westbury Gardens on Long Island, New York. In the film Ice Cold Angels , a number of scenes take place in this country estate. In the last scene (wedding party) of the film Hitch - The Date Doctor , the country estate can be seen from the garden. The film Wolf - Das Tier im Manne also presents this country estate as a film set.
Vandamm's house near the Mount Rushmore National Memorial was a mock-up and stylistically references to Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture .
German dubbed version
Unlike some other Hitchcock films (such as Vertigo - From the Realm of the Dead , The Window to the Courtyard or Cocktail for a Corpse ), The Invisible Third has only been dubbed once so far. Since this film was Hitchcock's first and only MGM production, the German editing was carried out by the MGM dubbing studios in Berlin-Tempelhof at the time.
Unusual in the dubbing is the German voice of Cary Grant, who was not set to music by his regular voice actor Curt Ackermann . Instead, he speaks to the professor , played by Leo G. Carroll . Erik Ode , who is responsible for the dialogue direction of the dubbed version at the MGM dubbing studio, cast himself (according to known information) for Cary Grant - but this assumption contradicts Ode's autobiography, in which it is stated that he has not directed dubbing for years and the occupation as speaker was a service of friendship for him. Since some very successful films with Grant had already been shown in German-speaking countries at the time of the premiere of The Invisible Third (including the film Above the Rooftops of Nice, also directed by Alfred Hitchcock ) and Ackermann had set all of these to music, the cast was changed as Mistake viewed.
The invisible third was first seen on German television on December 26, 1970 at 11:10 p.m. on ZDF .
| role | actor | German Dubbing voice |
|---|---|---|
| Roger O. Thornhill | Cary Grant | Erik Ode |
| Eve Kendall | Eva Marie Saint | Eva Pflug |
| Phillip Vandamm | James Mason | Friedrich Joloff |
| The professor | Leo G. Carroll | Curt Ackermann |
| Clara Thornhill | Jessie Royce Landis | Friedel Schuster |
| Leonard, Vandamm's henchman | Martin Landau | Dietrich Frauboes |
| Lester Townsend | Philip Ober | Kurt Waitzmann |
| Maggie, Thornhill's secretary | Doreen Lang | Ursula Diestel |
| Maid Elsie | Maudie Prickett | Alice Treff |
| Waiter Victor | Harry Seymour | Klaus Schwarzkopf |
| farmer | Andy Albin | Otto Czarski |
Reviews
“A brilliant movie with an exciting suspense , astonishing U-turns and playful surprises. Hitchcock combines all the qualities of thriller , adventure cinema and crime comedy in a virtuoso, at the same time highly entertaining way , and also offers an ambiguous, ironic anthology of American landscapes, myths and monuments. "
"The sum of all cinematic experiences."
“One of the best Hitchcock films that contains everything: tension, excitement, mystery, a love story and not just a little humor. Grant, Saint, Mason and Carroll are just gorgeous in their difficult roles. "
"Pure film, a very pleasant thing."
Age ratings
The film received an FSK-16 rating when it was originally tested. With this approval, the film came to the cinema. When it was re-examined, the film received an FSK-12 rating. All publications for home theater carry this FSK-12 approval.
Awards (selection)
- The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1960 in the categories of Best Editing , Best Screenplay and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration .
- Screenwriter Ernest Lehman received an award at the Edgar Allan Poe Awards for his work .
- In the same year, the film won the Laurel Award for Best Action Drama .
- In 1995 the film was entered into the National Film Registry .
literature
- François Truffaut : Mr. Hitchcock, how did you do it? . Heyne, 1973, ISBN 3-453-86141-8 (sequence of interviews (about 50 hours) of the French director with Hitchcock.) Original edition: Le cinéma selon Hitchcock (1966, German about: "The film according to Hitchcock")
- Robert A. Harris, Michael S. Lasky, eds. Joe Hembus : Alfred Hitchcock and his films (OT: The Films of Alfred Hitchcock). Citadel film book from Goldmann, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-442-10201-4
- John Russel Taylor: The Hitchcock Biography, Fischer Cinema 1982, ISBN 3-596-23680-0
- Donald Spoto: Alfred Hitchcock - The dark side of genius. Heyne, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-453-55146-X (German translation by Bodo Fründt)
- Bodo Fründt : Alfred Hitchcock and his films. Heyne Film Library Volume 91, 1986, ISBN 3-453-86091-8
- Bill Krohn: Hitchcock at work. Phaidon Press, 2000, ISBN 0-7148-4333-4 (Detailed study of Hitchcock's working method in his American time)
- Raymond Bellour: Symbolic Blockage (on North by Northwest) . In Constance Penley (Ed.): The Analysis of Film . Indiana University Press , Bloomington 2000, ISBN 9780253213648 , pp. 77-192
- Paul Duncan: Alfred Hitchcock, The Complete Films. German in Taschen-Verlag, Cologne, 2003, ISBN 3-8228-1671-X
Web links
- Dissertation: Bernard Herrmann's film music for "North by Northwest"
- North by Northwest in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- North by Northwest atRotten Tomatoes(English)
- Review by U. Behrens, filmzentrale
Individual evidence
- ↑ For example B. The escape movement Cary Grant in the film Arizona Dream by Vincent Gallo re-enacted in full length.
- ↑ Slipups.com: North by Northwest - It's gonna be loud!
- ↑ cf. François Truffaut: Mr. Hitchcock, how did you do it? Munich, Zurich. Diana 1999 p. 210 ff.
- ↑ See Krohn , p. 215 ff
- ^ S. Truffaut (1966) , p. 137
- ↑ cf. François Truffaut: Mr. Hitchcock, how did you do it? Munich, Zurich. Diana 1999, p. 35
- ↑ "I'm just great at north-northwest: when the wind is south, I can tell a church tower from a lamp post." Hamlet II, 2 zeno.org
- ↑ Tony Reeves: North By Northwest film locations. In: web presence movie-locations.com. The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations, accessed November 9, 2013 .