How Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest Exposed A Dark Hollywood Secret

March 2024 ยท 2 minute read

Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film, which would go on to be titled "North by Northwest," at one point had another, more unappealing name. "Our original title, you know, was 'The Man in Lincoln's Nose. Couldn't use it, though. They also wouldn't let us shoot people on Mount Rushmore," Hitchcock would later recount, according to "Scripted Words of Alfred Hitchcock:Concepts from the Master of Suspense." A U.S. government agency took exception to this and the director's idea of having Cary Grant hide in Abraham Lincoln's nostril and have a sneezing fit. "The Parks Commission of the Department of the Interior was rather upset at this thought," Hitchcock remembered (via "Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Volume 1").

When Hitchcock began using another working title, another much more powerful and secretive U.S. governmental agency intervened through contacts in Hollywood. The idea of calling the movie "The CIA Story," aroused the ire of its namesake, which had pushed movie studios to keep out any explicit references to the agency in its films, according to "Quiet Americans." In the late 1940s, the CIA began inserting itself into United States and European culture to push a pro-American agenda, from changing the ending of the film version of George Orwell's book "Animal Farm" so it had a more anti-Communist bent to promoting the Abstract Expressionist art movement to counter the Russians' Socialist Realism, per The New York Times.

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