In North by Northwest (1959), Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is forced to become one fictitious Caplan against his will. He becomes an innocent victim of a scheme of the CIA American secret service. Entrapped in a situation where it is difficult to escape and it leads him to the verge of death in Mount Rushmore along with the femme fatale Eve Kendell (Eva Marie Saint), where he has a face-to face encounter with death. Like Tom Rath in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Cary Grant becomes a cog in the system. The power elite here is the American spy agency. Cary Grant is the other-directed individual, his ways, day to day affairs are dictated by the elite few, unmoved by the emotions of an individual. He is the man in the gray flannel suit …show more content…
People chase the mythical American Dream for money, property and social status. Even though Cary Grant realises the truth he cannot escape the well-knitted snare. America became a stage for Hitchcock on which “big personalities enacted big events in the face of big structures” (Pomerance 220). In Mount Rushmore, a sequence of North by Northwest, we find a direct and altogether more insightful invocation of the American giant. The American presidents-ideal type-though pre-modern makes deals and leads his countrymen forward to heights of glory and generosity, independence, a man who makes arrangements so that there is chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, a sense of independence in every breast, which unifies different races and classes. These Presidential figures are magnified appropriately and “they are at once administrators, negotiators, philosophers and wheeler dealers” (Pomerance 221). Into and upon the four great faces-George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln rove the commercial king Roger Thornhill and his secret lover Eve Kendall. Both of them become minute in the face of the great figures as they scramble on. They are typical examples of common man doing the right thing