“In the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie, there’s only the expedient exaggeration.” So says Madison Avenue ad exec Roger Thornhill (the always debonair Cary Grant) at the beginning of the classic 1959 thriller “North by Northwest.” That sentiment doesn’t hold true in the world of movie-making, though, because the striking house that figures at the center of the film’s climax is, in fact, a lie. Easily one of the most famous screen residences of all time, in a sad irony the perilously cantilevered hilltop residence belonging to bad-guy spy Philip Vandamm (James Mason) isn’t actually a residence at all, but an artfully – and deceptively – crafted set that only ever existed inside of a soundstage.
“North by Northwest” (streaming now on HBO Max) has been called “the quintessential Alfred Hitchcock thriller” and it is no stretch to say that Vandamm’s pad is the quintessential villain’s lair. Though it doesn’t make an appearance until an hour and 57 minutes into the flick, the property, purported to abut the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota, struck a chord with audiences and remains one of the most talked-about, researched and pursued movie dwellings more than 60 years after the film’s original release.
Born from a singular idea the Master of Suspense pitched to screenwriter Ernest Lehman involving a chase scene taking place across the presidential faces at Mount Rushmore, “North by Northwest“ tells the story of the hapless Thornhill who falls victim to an unfortunate case of mistaken identity at the hands of the villainous Vandamm and his goons. The ensuing complications lead Roger on a thrilling game of cat and mouse played across the U.S., during which he meets and falls in love with mysterious double agent Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). Tantalizing and timeless, the movie effortlessly holds up today, though its seemingly nonsensical title has been a source of constant consternation. Of it, Hitchcock explained, “It’s a fantasy. The whole film is epitomized in the title – there is no such thing as north-by-northwest on the compass.”
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Image Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Cast and crew certainly traversed the U.S. in northerly and northwesterly directions during the shoot, filming sequences in New York (the Big Apple locales are expertly chronicled here), Chicago, Keystone, Bakersfield and Los Angeles. And while Hitch did make use of the lobby of Manhattan’s legendary Plaza Hotel, the majority of interior scenes and many exteriors, including all those featuring Vandamm’s clifftop pad, were captured on sets created by production designer Robert F. Boyle.
To complete the segments, the “North by Northwest” team descended upon Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in Culver City (now Sony Pictures Studio), where Frank’s dwelling was constructed on Stage 5.
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Image Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer In truth, only a small portion of the home’s façade was built for the film. The wide angles shown of the property were accomplished using mattes, an age-old special effects technique that utilizes paintings (often on a piece of glass afixed to the front of the camera) blended with live-action shots to create a fictionalized setting. As The Prop Gallery website explains, “A fixture in filmmaking since the birth of cinema, common uses for matte paintings include the extension of landscapes and structures which would be either impossible to build or prohibitively expensive and time-consuming . . . These paintings are combined with live-action footage to produce impressive shots which when perfectly executed can trick the audience into believing what they are seeing is real.” And trick audiences, they did!
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Image Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Even today, in the age of flawless CGI and other highly technical digital special effects renderings, audiences still firmly believe Vandamm’s house is the genuine article and typically go hunting for it on the internet as soon as the credits roll, only to be met with disappointment.
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Image Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Though the exterior is described in the script as “a sprawling modern structure in the Frank Lloyd Wright tradition set on a rise in the land at the end of a long driveway,” not much detail is given to the interior. Lehman outlines the setting as such, “[It’s] a large room, strikingly furnished, and dominated by a great chandelier which hangs suspended from the two-story-high beamed ceiling. A stairway at the far end leads to a balcony which runs the length of the room. Off this balcony are bedrooms.” From that rather nondescript phrasing, Boyle created a highly stylized space with floor-to-ceiling windows, a floating staircase, a towering fireplace and stacked stone walls reminiscent of the rugged terrain supposedly located right outside the glass walls. A modernistic marvel, the set undeniably calls to mind imagery of Wright’s 1937 masterpiece Fallingwater.
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Image Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer According to leading lady Saint in “Destination Hitchcock: The Making of ‘North by Northwest,’” the sequence at the Vandamm house, which accounts for 15 minutes of screen time, took six days to film.
“North by Northwest” employed quite a bit of location trickery, truth be told. Though wide shots of the real Mount Rushmore appear in the movie, the famous chase sequence was lensed at MGM on an elaborate set. Other spots that were faked? The Plaza Hotel’s iconic Oak Room bar, where Roger is initially kidnapped, as well as the interior of the General Assembly Building at the United Nations and the Mount Rushmore café. But the movie does feature one residence that is not only very real but open to the public! Purported to be in Glen Cove, the “large red brick house with a curved tree-lined driveway” belonging to Mr. Lester Townsend “of UNIPO” (Philip Ober) is actually Old Westbury Gardens in Old Westbury, Long Island. The oft-filmed estate, which also appears in “Hitch,” “Cruel Intentions” and “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” is a popular tourist destination, open daily (excluding Tuesdays) for tours. Don’t go looking for the lavish library where Thornhill is locked up after being kidnapped (“Don’t hurry – I’ll catch up on my reading.”) on the premises, though. Only the exterior of Old Westbury Gardens appears in “North by Northwest.” The interior of the Townsend home was – you guessed it – just a set built at MGM.
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