North By Northwest - Roger Thornhill Gets Saddled with the World's Worst Detectives
Alfred Hitchcock's famed masterpiece
North by Northwest has its fair share of twists and turns. The story follows Roger Thornhill, who is taken for someone else and kidnapped by two men and framed for illicit, drunken driving. That's the shorthand version. In order to prove his innocence to the officers who arrest him, Mr. Thornhill takes his mother and two detectives back to the house to which he was abducted. What he finds is that the owner, Mr. Townsend, is not in, and that his "wife," Mrs. Townsend, acts as if she knows Roger Thornhill in order to convince the detectives that Thornhill is completely deserving of a prison sentence. Roger later escapes police custody and finds himself in the United Nations, where he meets the real Mr. Townsend (not the man who once claimed to be Townsend). After a brief conversation, Mr. Townsend informs Roger that his house has been locked up for months and that his wife has been dead for years. Quickly after, Mr. Townsend is murdered and Roger is framed for the death. Townsend has a knife thrown into his back by an assailant working for the man Thornhill met before, and in the confusion, Thornhill pulls out the knife, making everyone think he killed the man. From that moment on, Thornhill becomes a national fugitive in every paper in the country. He has to find someone who believes his story! Well, in theory, couldn't he just ring up the two detectives? After all, Thornhill apparently just murdered a grand, public official, and if a little thing called an "obituary" exists, it doesn't take too much investigative work to remember, "Oh, wait. We met that dead guy's dead wife who was very much alive." After all, Townsend would have
something in
some paper about his deceased wife if he was murdered. Shouldn't that give the two detectives who traveled with Thornhill to the home a new perspective at Thornhill's "fabricated" story? That's quite a pretty big inconsistency for a movie about a man trying to prove that he isn't who he's being mistaken for and that he didn't do what he's been charged of. Of course, if you want to check out the full synopsis, you can head
here.