A concept painting (main image, above) by an MGM artist was sold at auction by Bonhams in Los Angeles for $4,075, in 2019. So Hitchcock turned to set designer Robert F Boyle to construct some of the facade, while the interiors were studio sets. Hitchcock tried to persuade the American modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright to build Vandamm House, but Wright demanded 10 per cent of the film’s total budget as his fee. That in itself is ironic, because Vandamm House is an illusion. No one in Vandamm House tells the truth except Thornhill - and he is an intruder. Everything appears to be calm, but beneath the surface its inhabitants’ intentions are murderous. In the film’s climactic scene Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are pursued on to the chiselled face of Mount Rushmore “I too believe in neatness,” he tells his adjutant. Likewise, Vandamm uses his surface charm to try to convince Kendall to board his plane - from which he plans to throw her into the sea. Vandamm House is desirable and immaculate, but it is also sinister. As the critic Pete Collard has pointed out, both are so vivid in his films that they start to become supporting characters, channelling the mood of a scene. Hitchcock’s preoccupation with architecture and interiors is more than set dressing. Thrillingly, he does this by clambering up rocks and the angular beams that attach Vandamm House to the mountainside, before intruding - modernist structural detail as plot enabler. Meanwhile, all-American hero Roger Thornhill - the permanently bemused Cary Grant - breaks in in an attempt to melt Kendall’s froideur (and save her life). Meanwhile, his frosty girlfriend/secret agent Eve Kendall, played by the supercool Eva Marie Saint, is forever calling down from the mezzanine, or gazing from the cantilevered rooms at the runway lights (of course, Vandamm House has a private airstrip instead of a front garden). The Mount Rushmore house that Cary Grant scales in ‘North by Northwest’ was a set built at MGM Studios, in HollywoodĪt the height of the drama, Vandamm - played with chilling charm by James Mason - prowls around his desirable living room plotting his defection with an assortment of sharply dressed henchmen. Even the house’s location is audacious: Vandamm built his lair on the rocky top of Mount Rushmore. Vandamm lives in decadent, open-plan luxury so rarefied it had to be imagined into existence by Hitchcock’s set designers. Or the Park family in Parasite: vain, idle, morally bankrupt, sitting around on covetable chairs in their calm, open-plan fortress.īut the best villain in a modernist masterpiece must be Phillip Vandamm, the clenched, cold war enemy of the US, in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest. Think of the Ben Rose House in Highland Park, the glass-and-steel home of Cameron's abusive father in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The film’s Mount Rushmore house, complete with dramatic roofline and wide overhang, presents an immaculate - if sinister - picture of desirability one year agoīad guys live in the best houses. United States Fantasy home: North by Northwest and its architectural star, the mid-century modernist villain’s lair
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