Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’ Screens Sunday at Mobile’s Saenger Theatre

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 spy thriller “North by Northwest” comes to the big screen at Mobile’s historic Saenger Theatre on Sunday, Aug. 21, at 3 p.m., continuing the venue’s classic film series. The screening gives Mobile audiences a chance to see one of the most celebrated of all Hollywood thrillers the way it was made to be seen — on a large screen, with an audience, in a restored movie palace.

The film stars Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, a hapless New York advertising executive who is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies and pursued across the country as he scrambles to stay alive. Eva Marie Saint and James Mason round out the cast of one of Hitchcock’s most beloved pictures. Admission is $6 for adults, with tickets $3 for children 12 and under and seniors 60 and older — a price point the theater has kept deliberately low to make classic cinema accessible to families and longtime film fans alike.

The picture and its place in film history

“North by Northwest” arrived at the peak of Hitchcock’s American period, following the enormous success of “Vertigo” and preceding “Psycho.” Written by Ernest Lehman, the film was conceived as a kind of grand tour of suspense — a chase picture that moves from the towers of Manhattan to the cornfields of the Midwest and finally to the face of Mount Rushmore. Hitchcock wanted audiences to experience the whole country as a minefield for his hero, and the film’s structure still holds up: nearly every sequence builds on the last, and the set pieces have been referenced and parodied for decades.

The famous crop-duster sequence, in which Thornhill waits alone at a rural bus stop and is attacked by a biplane in broad daylight, has become one of the most studied scenes in American film. The finale on the faces of Mount Rushmore and the flirtatious, high-stakes exchanges between Grant and Saint set a template that spy thrillers have followed ever since. Film historians regularly cite the picture when they describe Hitchcock’s gift for making ordinary places — a train, a hotel lobby, an auction house, a highway shoulder — feel dangerous.

Cast and characters

Cary Grant, then in his mid-fifties, brings the light touch the role demands: Thornhill is a smooth-talking ad man whose world is overturned in an afternoon when he is mistaken for a man who does not exist. Eva Marie Saint plays Eve Kendall, the mysterious woman who appears at just the wrong — or exactly the right — moment on the train to Chicago. James Mason, fresh off a string of memorable villain roles, plays the cultured and ruthless Philip Vandamm, while Martin Landau appears as his restless lieutenant Leonard. Jessie Royce Landis, who played Grant’s mother in “To Catch a Thief,” appears here as Thornhill’s unbothered mother.

Composer Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock’s frequent collaborator, supplied the swirling score, and the film’s title design by Saul Bass is among the most recognizable of the era. The combination of Herrmann’s music, Robert Burks’ cinematography and Hitchcock’s precise staging is a large part of why the film rewards the theatrical experience that the Saenger series exists to provide.

The Saenger Theatre

The Saenger, a restored movie palace on Joachim Street in downtown Mobile, has served the Gulf Coast since the 1920s, when the Saenger chain built ornate neighborhood palaces across the South. The Mobile house opened as a first-run movie theater and vaudeville venue, one of the grandest rooms in the city, with the atmospheric detailing and deep stage that distinguished the chain’s houses. Like many downtown theaters, it later fell on hard times as audiences moved to suburban multiplexes, and it survived a period of decline and storm damage before a major restoration returned it to service as the city’s performing arts centerpiece.

Today the Saenger hosts touring Broadway productions, concerts, comedy, dance and the classic film series, and it anchors the blocks of restaurants and shops that surround it in downtown Mobile. For many in the audience, the building is half the appeal: the lobby, the auditorium and the stage house were built at a scale that modern multiplexes do not attempt, and seeing a film there connects the experience of moviegoing to the way audiences watched pictures when Hitchcock’s films were new.

Why the classic film series matters

The series that brings “North by Northwest” to Mobile is part of a broader effort by theaters across the country to keep older films on big screens. Many of the most influential American movies were photographed for theatrical projection, with compositions, lighting and sound mixes that lose their effect on home televisions and phone screens. A 1959 widescreen thriller is a particularly strong case: the film’s chase photography, its landscapes and its carefully staged crowd scenes are built for scale.

For younger audiences, a Sunday afternoon screening is often a first chance to see Grant, Saint and Mason as contemporaries saw them. For older audiences, it is a return to a film that many have seen only on television. The Saenger’s $6 adult admission — and $3 tickets for children 12 and under and seniors 60 and older — puts the outing within reach of both groups, and the 3 p.m. Sunday start makes it an easy family trip or a stop before dinner downtown.

Planning the visit

The theater sits on Joachim Street in the heart of downtown Mobile, within walking distance of the restaurants and bars along Dauphin Street and Bienville Square. Patrons attending the Sunday screening can expect the usual rhythm of a Saenger classic film event: doors open well before showtime, concessions are available in the lobby, and seating is general with the house opening in the early afternoon for a 3 p.m. start. Parking in the surrounding blocks is typically manageable on a Sunday, but arriving early remains the simplest way to avoid circling the blocks near the theater.

As always with repertory screenings, the best advice is to arrive on time — the crop-duster and Rushmore sequences are the kind of scenes that a packed house receives loudly, and no one wants to walk in during the auction. Tickets are available through the theater’s box office, and details about the film and the rest of the classic series are posted on the Saenger’s event listings.

Hitchcock on the Gulf Coast screen

The Aug. 21 screening continues the Saenger’s practice of programming Hitchcock and other directors from the studio era alongside its touring shows. Classic film programming has become a reliable part of the theater’s calendar in recent years, drawing audiences that might not otherwise come downtown and giving the restored house the kind of regular use its restoration was meant to ensure. Mobile audiences have shown steady appetite for the format — a Sunday afternoon, a landmark film and a landmark room.

“North by Northwest” in particular suits the series. It is a crowd-pleaser rather than a difficult film: brisk, funny and suspenseful, with a running time that moves quickly and scenes that have entered the popular imagination even among people who have never seen the picture end to end. The mistaken-identity premise, the train encounters, the auction scene in which Thornhill stalls for time, and the plane attack all land as well with a first-time viewer as with someone who has seen the film a dozen times.

The film’s lasting influence

The movie’s fingerprints are everywhere in later filmmaking. The innocent-man-on-the-run structure Hitchcock refined here echoes through decades of thrillers and action pictures, and the film’s blend of romance, danger and deadpan humor became a model for the spy genre as a whole. The sequence with the biplane is taught in film schools as an exercise in escalating tension, and the love scenes between Grant and Saint remain a master class in dialogue that says one thing and means another. More than six decades after its release, the American Film Institute and critics’ polls continue to rank it among the greatest American films, and among the greatest thrillers ever made.

That longevity is part of the argument for seeing it communally. Jokes that fall flat on a small screen land in a theater; suspense sequences that feel familiar at home become tense again when two hundred people are watching the same bus stop at the same time. The Saenger’s screen and sound system were restored with exactly this kind of programming in mind.

One afternoon, one classic

For the price of a matinee snack at a modern multiplex, Mobile audiences this Sunday can watch Cary Grant flee across America, Eva Marie Saint keep him guessing and James Mason close in — all inside a 1920s movie palace on Joachim Street that has outlasted nearly everything else about the era it was built for. The curtain goes up at 3 p.m. at the Saenger Theatre, and whether it is a first viewing or a fiftieth, “North by Northwest” on a big screen remains one of the surest bets in classic cinema.

Tickets, showtime details and information about the rest of the Saenger’s upcoming film and live-event schedule are available through the theater’s box office and event listings. Adults are admitted for $6, with $3 tickets for children 12 and under and for seniors 60 and older, at the Sunday, Aug. 21 screening.