Cary Grant’s Suit

North by Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are ‘woven’ together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there — he gets knitted into his suit, into his job, before our very eyes. Indeed some of the popular ‘suitings’ of that time (‘windowpane’ or ‘glen plaid’) perfectly complemented office buildings. Cary’s suit reflects New York, identifies him as a thrusting exec, but also arms him, protects him: what else is a suit for? Reflects and Protects: a slogan Cary’s character, Roger Thornhill, might have come up with himself.

But, as Thoreau wrote, ‘A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in.’ Cary may cut quite a figure but as a person he is meaningless, so far. We find him in the Suit, but certainly he has not found himself, or ‘what to do’.

The recent idiom of calling a guy a ‘suit’ if you don’t like him, consider him a flunky or a waste of space, applies to Cary at the beginning of the film: this suit comes barrelling out of the elevator, yammering business trivialities a mile a minute, almost with the energy of the entire building. The suit moves with its secretary into the hot evening sun, where we can get a good look at it: it’s a real beauty, a perfectly tailored, gracefully falling lightweight dusty blue — it might be a gown, you know. It’s fun to think of it as ‘dusty’ blue because of what befalls it later. It’s by far the best suit in the movie, in the movies, perhaps the whole world. The villains, James Mason and Martin Landau, wear suits of funereal, sinister (though sleek and pricey) black, while their greasy henchmen run around in off-the-peg browny crap. ‘The Professor’, head of Intelligence, bumbles about in pipe-smoked tweed and a revolting shirt of old-man blue.

In 1959, the year North By Northwest was released, America was a white-shirt-and-black-suit nation: the ‘revolution’, if you want to dignify it that way, was ten years off. There’s a nice photograph of Ernest Lehman, who wrote this picture, sitting in Hitchcock’s office, a typically late Fifties black-and-white office, natty in a white shirt and narrow black tie. Some could make this look good but if you were forced to dress this way, if you worked for IBM, say, it contributed only to the general gloominess of the age. Sometimes you can find yourself wondering if life itself was conducted in colour then — even the ‘summer of love’ was largely photographed in black and white. Don’t let anyone kid you: the Sixties were dreary.

Outside on Madison, the white shirts blind you, but not one of them is quite so white as Cary’s. (As someone with a slight experience of applying theatrical make-up, I have no idea how they kept it off these white, white collars. It drives me nuts.) Non-streaky Cary’s daring and dashing in the most amazing suit in New York. His silk tie is exactly one shade darker than the suit, his socks exactly one shade lighter. In the cab he tells his secretary to remind him to ‘think thin’, which commands us to regard his suit, how it lies on his physique.

A friend of mine in politics said to me once, ‘I love wearing suits. They’re like pyjamas. You can go around all day doing business in your pyjamas.’ It has to be said that his suits were pretty nice, particularly so for Boston; whether he meant that he did his business half asleep only his constituents could say.

The suit, Cary inside it, strides with confidence into the Plaza Hotel. Nothing bad happens to it until one of the greasy henchmen grasps Cary by the shoulder. We’re already in love with this suit and it feels like a real violation. They’ve mistaken Roger Thornhill for a federal agent called George Kaplan. They bundle him into a cab and shoot out to Long Island, not much manhandling yet. In fact Martin Landau is impressed: ‘He’s a well-tailored one, isn’t he?’ He loves the suit. But next moment Cary tries to escape —there’s a real struggle, they force all that bourbon down his throat. (He later thinks they’ll find liquor stains on the sofa, but if there was that much violence why aren’t there any on the suit?) Cut to Cary being stuffed into the Mercedes-Benz — he’s managed to get completely pissed without even ‘mussing’ his hair. On his crazy drink-drive, the collar of his jacket is turned the wrong way round. That’s all. He gets arrested, jerked around by the cops, conks out on a table and appears before the judge next morning, and the suit and the shirt both look great. But this is the point in the picture where you start to worry about Cary’s personal hygiene. Start to ITCH. Cops aren’t generally too open-handed with showers.

It’s back to the bad guy’s house, then back to the Plaza, looking good. I always hope he’ll grab a quick shower in the hotel room — he keeps gravitating towards the bathroom. There’s a good suit moment when he tries on one belonging to Kaplan, the guy he’s looking for, who doesn’t exist. Kaplan’s suits are stodgy, old-fashioned, unbelievably heavy for a summer in New York — with turn-ups on the trousers. So much for the sartorial acumen of the US government. ‘I don't think that one does anything for you,’ says Cary’s mom, and boy is she right. She also jokes that Kaplan maybe ‘has his suits mended by invisible weavers’, which is what happens to Cary’s suit throughout the picture! His suit is like a victim of repeated cartoon violence — in the next shot it’s always fine.

Off to the United Nations, where the Secretariat looks even more like Cary than his own office building. He sublimely matches a number of modern wall coverings and stone walls here and throughout the picture. He pulls a knife out of a guy, but doesn’t get any blood on himself. There’s a curious lack of blood in North by Northwest; it must be all to save the suit, though there must be ten or even twenty of them in reserve, no? Cary evades the bad guys again and scoots over to Grand Central Station, where they have, or had, showers, but he’s too busy.