North By Northwest’s Best Scene Was Alfred Hitchcock’s Way Of Dodging A Suspense Cliche

Cary Grant‘s Thornhill is one of the most-used types in Hitchcock pictures, an ordinary person out of their element, like Guy Haines in “Strangers on a Train” or the McKennas of “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Thornhill cuts a diminutive silhouette against the vast midwest roadside, visually prompting the audience to speculate on how their intrepid hero might be dispatched. Drive-by shooting? A roadside stabbing? All is possible with the Master of Suspense, whose aim in the crop dusting sequence was to keep everyone guessing.

The scene begins with Thornhill placed on a rural road, the starting point of what Hitchcock describes as a “train of thought in the audience” that features passing cars, a mysterious stranger, and finally an out-of-place airplane as potential killers. Hitchcock incrementally dials up the suspense until the third threat – the crop dusting plane – drives Thornhill into a cornfield. This, Hitchcock says, is where the grand design makes it worthwhile:

“There is no cover until he gets into the cornfield. Now, you do in the design a very important thing. You smoke him out with the very instrument that you’re using, a crop duster. Theory being, don’t have a crop duster without your using it, otherwise you could have any airplane. So the dusting of the crop, the dust rather from the crop duster, smokes him out of the cornfield and he dashes in front of the truck desperately and the plane makes a last dive, mistimes it. Or the truck does come to a stop by his frantic waving and out goes the whole lot. So you see, this is by design.”

Wrongly accused men are frequent players in the Hitchcock catalogue, but “North by Northwest” interrupts the model with little more than an open road on a barren field, and it’s now one of the most memorable moments in cinema history.