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New York's Plaza Hotel was used for
key scenes in North by Northwest |
Alfred Hitchcock’s
affection for locations began as a young boy growing up in the lower
middle-class community of Leytonstone, England where, for lack of funds,
he was forced to walk to get anywhere. This gave him a keen eye when it
came to seeing the potential in natural and manmade sites for movie
backdrops.
Later, as a young film director working on shoestring budgets, he
depended upon the use of London’s buildings and environment to eliminate
costly set reproductions. He was one of the first directors to shoot a
scene on location in a restaurant (Simpsons-on-the-Strand) in Sabotage,
and, the first to negotiate the use of New York’s landmark Plaza Hotel
for key scenes in North by Northwest.
Hitchcock came to the U.S. in l939 to work for David Selznick. His first
American film, Rebecca, was based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier.
Commenting later on the film, Hitchcock said that Manderley, the mansion
around which all of the action in the movie revolved, “was the real
star” of the movie.
That description applied to most of his films, where the repeated use of
landmarks and the associations they conjured in viewers had an almost
hypnotic – not to say narcotic – effect on them.
Nine of his films were set in New York City. All of them exploited and
aggrandized locales that were instantly familiar to audiences. They were
also an obvious compilation of associations that the émigré
director had made with the “town” that he openly loved and even coveted.
 Whether
or not intentional, the films, shot in the 50s and 60s, capture the last
vestiges of a city with a Runyonesque soul – before the post-war
building boom replaced a lot of the brick and brownstones with glass
skyscrapers; when the language and culture of the city was still WASPy
and the dominant vices were drinking and philandering. In Hitchcock’s
New York City films, the social strata are well-defined, and viewers
enter a world of power and money where everything is fashionable,
expensive and recherché.
It is no accident that Hitchcock chose Cary Grant as the protagonist in
North by Northwest, as Grant, an actual resident at the Plaza Hotel, was
also a regular on the 20th Century Limited to Chicago, which departed
nightly from the iconic Grand Central Station. Consequently, Grant “knew
the moves” and his behavior in no way obtruded upon the evolution of the
character of Roger. O. Thornhill.
Grant`s own concealed Jewish identity (he was born Larry Leach in
Bristol, England) may also have influenced the director’s use of the
actor in this difficult scenario of mistaken identity as George Kaplan.
 Hitchcock’s assimilation into the rarefied circle of New York society is
venerated in all of his New York films almost to the extent of being
kitsch. He wined and dined at the 21 Club, the Stork Club, Ciro`s,
Pavilion and others. The 21 Club not only is the animus of the
protagonist in Spellbound, whose repression has something to do with
what was said at lunch at 21, but it is also where Grace Kelly lunches
in Rear Window and from where she orders dinner for herself and Jimmy
Stewart which, of course, is choice 21 fare – steak and potatoes (the
thin, stringy kind from which McDonald’s has made a fortune)
There is an apocryphal story that when Kay Brown, Selznick`s New York
story editor, was wooing Hitchcock, she took him to lunch there. Not
only did he devour one round of steak and fries, but he ate his way
through the same order again and again, until the restaurant closed.
The Stork Club also featured prominently as another drinking hole for
Hitchcock, Henry Fonda and other film industry notables. It was there
that the director undoubtedly became aware of the situation of Emmanuel
Balestrero, a Stork Club bass player whose wrongful arrest for an armed
robbery led to one of Hitchcock’s rare reality-based films – this one
with a Queens locale, yet – The Wrong Man.
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