Sex and Secrets
HOW MANY TIMES have I seen North by Northwest? Impossible to count—40, 50? Sometimes a few notes from Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack will sneak up on me and stick, so suddenly that whatever I’m doing, however pedestrian—washing dishes, grading papers—is scored by that peppy fandango. I know the brilliant script practically by heart, too, and odd lines will jetsam up from memory, apropos of nothing in particular: Just pay the two dollars … You gentlemen aren’t really trying to kill my son, are you?
I was a toddler in 1959, so the movie isn’t a nostalgic part of my past. But my husband, who was a preteen when the movie came out, saw it five times the month of its release. Cary Grant was the icon who spoke to him about possibilities more exotic than the American life he was leading (Catholic school, chores, church on Sundays). At basketball practice, furious about some bad play, the coach berated him: “Who do you think you are—Cary Grant?”
North by Northwest has often been dismissed, as critic Murray Pomerance notes, as “a featherweight picaresque.” Although some criticism has focused on the movie as a commentary on American consumerism and identity, the film’s central romance gets very little scholarly attention. Many a PhD thesis has unpacked the heavy baggage of Alfred Hitchcock’s queer coding in other movies. In Rope, being gay is synonymous with being a sociopathic murderer, and other films contain insinuations about the skewed sexuality of brainy, bespectacled, butch women. North by Northwest, however, with the heteronormative romance at its core, has mostly escaped being slotted into the larger discussion of Hitchcock’s twisted vision of passion. And that’s unfortunate, because it represents something of a corrective: it’s Hitchcock’s most jubilant, unneurotic celebration of sexuality, both straight and gay (or bi).
IF I HADN’T MARRIED ALMA, Hitchcock legendarily said, I could have been a poof (derogatory slang his, not mine).
If I were a gay man,. Who cares that his breath stinks of fish? So does that of his dining companion, Eva Marie Saint. (“A little trouty,” Saint declares, about their entrée choice of brook trout, British slang for an ugly woman, also for a slut.) Grant’s daughter has disputed the rumors of his homosexuality, though she does allow that her father might have indulged in some bisexual experimentation, and she even says that he would have enjoyed the innuendos—as a way of making women want to prove them wrong.
