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Perhaps the most famous sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest isn’t the
climactic chase across Mount Rushmore that inspired the story, but instead, a completely
gratuitous event— the crop duster attack.
According to screenwriter Ernest Lehman, Hitchcock told him, "I've always wanted to do a scene
in the middle of nowhere — where there's absolutely nothing.
You're out in the open, and there's nothing all around you.
The camera can turn around 360 degrees, and there's nothing there but this one man standing
all alone — because the villains, who are out to kill him, have lured him out to this
lonely spot."
So what went into making such an iconic scene?
We’ll find out in today’s episode of Making Film...
Hitchcock had said that he wanted to subvert the cliché of a man lured to a dark intersection
of the city with rain-slick streets and a black cat strolling by (Hitchcock/Truffaut 256).
His idea was the exact opposite— a bright day in the middle of nowhere.
There is no one hiding in a darkened alley, because there is no alley.
There’s no place for a villain to hide— there’s nothing for miles.
As ridiculous as it sounds, Hitchcock’s original idea was that suddenly “a tornado
comes along” (Lehman Interview, 2000).
It’s an interesting idea, but it doesn’t make sense for this kind of movie.
Lehman asked Hitchcock how the villains could create a tornado and Hitchcock didn’t know.
Lehman suggested that maybe a plane could come along and Hitchcock loved it, adding
that it should be a crop duster and that they should plant crops nearby (Lehman Interview, 2000).
By the way, the cost of planting the cornfield and securing the location was $5,200, which
today would be a little over $44,000 (fashionphotohistory).
In the first draft of the script, it was a wheat field instead of a cornfield.
Lehman and Hitchcock had written to the Research Department asking [quote] “What crops grow
within two hours automobile drive of Chicago that a man can run into and be hidden from
a diving plane?
Wheat?
Corn?
Others?
Are any of these crops normally dusted in the fall, or at any other time of the year?” (Krohn 210).
Apparently there is few surviving documents on the planning of the crop-duster scene because
it provided very few problems during the production especially when compared to the difficulty
in shooting the Mount Rushmore sequence, which needed [quote] “twenty-six matte shots and
required two conferences with Burks and Boyle (Krohn 211).
The sequence is about ten minutes long with very little dialogue.
“Hot day.”
“Seen worse.”
Hitchcock and Lehman acted out the entire sequence in Hitchcock’s living room and
then Lehman incorporated everything they did into the script.
This is why the sequence appears in the script pretty much just like it does
in the finished film (Lehman Interview, 1976).
Pat Hitchcock: “He’d have a finished script.
He would then take a pad with three rectangles on it.
He would then draw every single shot in the picture. He would then go over it with the cameraman.
So, by the time he got on the set, he knew exactly what that movie was going to look like
up on the screen.”
Hitchcock often said that production is a bore because, by the time they get to that stage,
he has already made the entire movie on paper (Lehman Interview, 1976).
The storyboards for the film were illustrated by Mintor Huebner, who had also done the storyboards
for Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (Auiler 327).
The entire film was planned out shot by shot by Hitchcock, Lehman, and Huebner.
The script contained most of the angles and shot sizes already, but the storyboards are
pretty much exactly what we see in the film (Auiler 327).
As described in the book, Hitchcock’s Notebooks [quote]" It is Hitchcock’s sequence—but
it is his sequence as realized by Lehman and Huebner” (Auiler 327).
Here, we can see Hitchcock’s rough sketch of the most iconic shot of Thornhill running
from the plane:
And here is Huebner’s storyboard:
Now, I’m not sure if this is entirely true.
Another source claims that there were no storyboards made to plan this scene and that these storyboards
were actually done after the fact for publicity purposes (Krohn 209).
The source is the book 'Hitchcock at Work' by Bill Krohn and he writes that they instead
used a diagram and a shot-list to plan the scene.
This is the diagram showing the plan for the Crop Duster scene.
Everywhere you see a ’T’ in a circle, that’s supposed to represent Thornhill
and his movements (Krohn 206).
We can also see the shot-list here.
I’ll link to these in the description so that you can check them out.
Because of the speed of production, this diagram and shot-list were used instead of storyboards (Krohn 206).
Krohn also writes that the scene was designed by Hitchcock, the cameraman Robert Burks and
the production designer Robert Boyle.
The source for this is a memo from October 6th, 1958 containing notes and mostly a list
of shots of the airplane (Krohn 211).
I’m not sure where the storyboards factor in, but it appears to me that, at least, Hitchcock
and Lehman wrote out the scene with camera angles and then Hitchcock took that to the
cameraman and production designer to turn it into a more concrete plan and shot-list.
We can see that the opening establishing shot is pretty dang close to its storyboard counterpart.
Hitchcock was originally going to begin the sequence with a dollyshot of the bus pulling
up that would then crane up to show the extent of the location.
He threw this out in favor of starting the sequence with a dissolve from Eve’s face
to the place she is sending Thornhill (Krohn).
This was shot in California, not in Indiana like the film portrays.
To get this shot, they used a crane, but there was a town visible in the background, so they
had to matte it out (Destination Hitchcock).
With the scope of the narrative space established, our intellect kicks in.
Hitchcock: “The first essential to get the ordinary mixed up with the extra-ordinary
is that you have prairie-like land around you and a man in a business suit.
See, there’s your immediate counter-point.”
The point is to confuse the audience members, who want to figure out where the threat is
coming from, but don't know from where.
We are put into Thornhill’s shoes with the various point-of-view shots, but what’s
important is that we see the crop duster pretty much straight away, and since it appears normal
for the setting and nothing is happening, we file it away as a harmless
part of the narrative space.
And before we have time to consider the plane, a car comes speeding down the road.
Surely something will happen with this car— after all, it is approaching very fast and loud,
but alas, it is nothing.
The same thing happens with a more menacing looking car.
It seems like nothing is happening, but really, there is a variety of possible threats that
present themselves before turning out to be nothing.
This man reminds us of the crop duster in the middle of some mundane chitchat.
“Some of them crop-duster pilots get rich… if they live long enough.”
Hitchcock: “Now the next question was: if it’s so ordinary as this, now you begin
to gradually drift into the extra-ordinary.
Because you bring up the question, naturally, there is a plane dusting crops
where there are no crops.
So immediately your audience are beginning to sit up.”
He brings it to our attention in just a way that tells us something isn’t right, but
leaves before we have time to consider why it seems off.
The bus pulling up and the man leaving interrupts our thought process.
As Hitchcock said, now Cary Grant can’t talk with the man about this mysterious plane (Eyes on Cinema).
By the time we are back thinking about the plane, it has already begun making its move.
Filmmaker Francois Truffaut noted that
Hitchcock is going against the traditional editing style here.
Instead of increasing the tempo of the shots during the action, Hitchcock uses pretty much
equal shot duration for everything at this point in the scene (Hitchcock/Truffaut audio).
Hitchcock said, "Here you’re not dealing with time but with space.
The length of the shots was to indicate the various distances that a man had to run for
cover and, more than that, to show that there was no cover to run to.
This kind of scene can’t be wholly subjective because it would go by in a flash.
Hitchcock describes subjectivity in both shots of our view of the subject of the scene and
shots of what they see.
So, a shot-reverse-shot would be a subjective sequence.
It’s necessary to show the approaching plane, even before Cary Grant spots it, because if
the shot is too fast, the plane is in and out of the frame too quickly for the viewer
to realize what’s happening” (Hitchcock/Truffaut 254).
Using only subjective shots, the scene might look like this:
But this takes all of the suspense out of it and turns it into just an action scene.
The audience doesn’t have time to anticipate what will happen, they are just reacting to
a series of events in rapid succession.
Hitchcock said that he used this same technique when directing The Birds.
A subjective view would have the birds attack the people out of nowhere
because the characters aren’t expecting it.
However, the anticipation of seeing the birds dive adds to the suspense and without the
shot of the birds diving, the audience might not even be sure that
what they saw was a bird at all (Hitchcock/Truffaut audio).
So, the crop duster sequence is made up of a series of subjective shots—like Cary Grant’s
point of view and reaction shots— and a few objective shots— like shots of what
the plane is doing that Cary Grant doesn’t see.
This allows us to understand what is happening intellectually with the objective shots and
empathize emotionally with the subjective shots at the same time.
We can see here that they used rear-projection to get the shot of Cary Grant diving for cover
as the plane flies overhead.
The shot of the plane that was projected on the screen was filmed in 70mm while the rest
of the film was shot on 35mm (fashionphotohistory).
They did this to make sure the image quality was maintained while
photographing the screen on 35mm.
Here is a photo of them shooting the plane diving toward the camera for the shot.
The second unit got this shot [quote] “during a 3-day period between October 6th to 8th
in 1958 on the 30th to 32nd days of production” (fashionphotohistory).
However, most of these shots of Grant and the plane were done for real.
Here, we can get a sense of the camera setup.
There were supposed to be three shots from a helicopter showing the crop duster’s point
of view, but they were thrown out before production (Krohn 211).
Now Hitchcock has principle of [quote] “utilizing materials to the fullest dramatic extent” (AFI).
In an interview with the American Film Institute, he discusses an example of this.
Hitchcock: “In the picture North by Northwest, Cary Grant is trapped in an auction room.
He can’t get out, except by one way and that’s bidding.
Crazy bidding, you see.
So he gets himself thrown out, but the essential point is, he is in an auction room and you
must use the auction room.”
In this way, the auction room isn’t just an arbitrary setting.
There is purpose to everything.
At one point he wanted Cary Grant to hide inside Lincoln’s nose and then have a sneezing fit.
But, how does this factor into the crop duster scene?
Hitchcock: “One rule I have, one very essential- if you have a crop duster, you must let it dust.
Therefore, he runs into the corn and hides in the corn.
What does the airplane do?
It dusts the crops.
It does its job… on a man and not on the crops.”
They actually had to shoot part of the sequence after Grant flees the cornfield a second time
because the script supervisor forgot to make sure that
Grant was covered in crop dust for continuity (Destination Hitchcock).
It seems like they shot the part of Grant in the crops on a soundstage separate from
shooting on location, so it isn’t that crazy to think that no one would have noticed.
Here we can see a continuity photograph for Grant’s dusty look.
Thornhill sees a tanker truck approaching and runs out to flag it down.
The pilot, expecting the tanker truck to speed by Thornhill crashes into the side of the
tank exploding on impact.
Let’s be honest, this model could have been better, but hey, it’s quick.
I like the little Thornhill laying under the front of the truck.
Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for crop dusters to crash because the dust canisters
had an effect on the balance of the planes (Krohn 211).
There was a time when we might have actually seen who exactly was attempting to bump off Thornhill.
The person shooting at Cary Grant was Licht, who we would have seen in the burning remains
of the plane and you’ll notice that Licht
doesn’t appear in the film again after that scene (Krohn 211).
After seeing a rough cut of the sequence, Lehman wrote a memo to Hitchcock suggesting
the sound effects be louder.
Hitchcock ignored the memo and opted to let the images speak for themselves, which likely
lends insight into why he decided not to use music in the sequence until the end (Krohn 213).
Many films and television shows have referenced or paid homage to the Crop Duster scene.
“This is what a cornfield looks like, honey.”
The one that sticks out the most to me doesn’t feature anyone chased by a plane.
I’m talking about the scene in Se7en where John Doe gets Mills and Somerset to go out
to the middle of nowhere for the last part of John Doe’s plan.
This was, no doubt, inspired by the Crop Duster sequence in North by Northwest.
I don’t know, there’s just something menacing about open spaces sometimes...
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