I happen to be writing this on board ship, in a little café, at a table by the window, with an idle eye on any glamorous women passing by. And as always in such settings I think of North by Northwest, which contains the all-time great strangers-on-a-train/ships-in-the-night scene. In a lifetime’s travel, everyone should have a North by Northwest moment: on the Twentieth Century train to Chicago, Cary Grant walks into a crowded dining car and is seated opposite Eva Marie Saint, the coolest of cool blondes. The conversation starts out quietly smouldering and heats up from there:
It’s not just a pick-up scene. Grant is on the lam, wanted for a murder he didn’t commit, with his face splashed across the front page of every newspaper and disguising himself only with a pair of sunglasses that do not seem entirely natural on an evening train. So the scene doesn’t only sizzle, it also has an underlying tension. Miss Saint is a classic Hitchcock blonde; it’s not just the hair colour, she seems blonde all over — eyes, cheeks, lips — and the playful unhurried evenly modulated voice with all the time in the world is the sort of thing you’d love to stick around for, if only the train hadn’t pulled to a halt so the cops could board.He: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.She: What makes you think you have to conceal it?He: She might find the idea objectionable.She: Then again, she might not…He: Is that a proposition?She: I never discuss love on an empty stomach.He: You’ve already eaten.She: But you haven’t…
The man who wrote those words was Ernest Lehman, who died last week in his 90th year.
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