Blog

29. North by Northwest - Crop Duster Attack

“That plane’s dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.”

Hitchcock once said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” Never has this been truer than of this sequence from his 1959 classic. I can think of no director working today who would have the patience to pull this off.

As the film’s screenwriter Ernest Lehman said, “Only a Hitchcock could direct a sequence in which nothing happens for almost eight minutes and it still holds your attention.” And that’s exactly what happens.

Lehman said that Hitchcock wanted a scene in which a man is standing in isolation. The camera could pan 360 degrees and there would be nothing. I think this explains the very wise choice to avoid music. If there was music, even that would be something to fill the void. But in this sequence, our hero, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is completely alone.

Here Hitchcock plays on a primal uncertainty. Who hasn’t sat around waiting for somebody and wondered if every single car that pulled up was them? The air is pregnant with something, but we don’t know what. Hitchcock even foreshadows the crop duster and we still don’t see it coming. When the plane finally approaches, it’s almost like it takes Thornhill (and us) a moment to realize he’s in an action sequence.

But even then, Hitch won’t hit you with the phat beats. There’s no music until the very end of the sequence. That’s how dedicated he is to the scene. He knows it doesn’t need it.

This is, by the way, the very definition of a textbook action sequence. The storyboards were in a textbook I read in high school and the screenplay excerpt appears in Willaim Goldman’s Which Lie Did I Tell?

It’s in Spanish, and the first half of the waiting is missing, but you get the idea…

See also: The rest of North by Northwest, the anticipation of the bang throughout all of The Wages of Fear, Tom Cruise vs. a predator drone in Mission: Impossible III

Next: When lists collide.