2007/06/13 by Jeffrey Auerbach, Lisa Gitelman · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Environmental Science · #Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis #Photography and Visual Culture #American Environmental and Regional History
paper · doi:10.1093/alh/ajm022
openalex publication_date 2007/06/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/16
“I see you've got the pumpkin,” Cary Grant says to Eva Marie Saint in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), just before they scramble over the brows and necklines of Mt. Rushmore, made out of concrete and stagecraft on the MGM back lot. But Saint's character is carrying an antique figurine, not a squash. Hitchcock is alluding to the so-called Pumpkin Papers, microfilmed state secrets that Whittaker Chambers hid inside a pumpkin and then produced as evidence in making his charges against Alger Hiss a decade or so before the filming of this sequence. Hitchcock's antique figurine is stuffed with microfilm, tiny pictures of national importance, now handed and dragged across those giant faces of national heroes. The chase over Mt. Rushmore offers a neat conflation of what Siegried Kracauer identified as two particularly “cinematic” subjects (41): “the small and the big” (46), which “seem to exert a peculiar attraction on the medium” (41): the camera loves them. As Kracauer explains, “the small is conveyed in the form of close-ups” (46), whereas the big includes “vast plains or panoramas of any kind” (50). Hitchcock puts these two together. His conflation of cinematic subjects depends upon as well as corrupts the spectator's intuitive sense of scale. There is a vertiginous effect, as the spectator must experience the intuitive small and intuitive big as counterintuitive filmic effects in the very same sequence that reveals (in a true close-up) the tiny rolls of microfilm (now huge up on the screen) inside the broken figurine. With the rolls exposed (the case cracked, literally), the movie draws to a close in a manner typical of Hitchcock Cold War productions: the hero rescues and marries/domesticates the girl (herself a spy), and simultaneously saves the nation by ensuring its secrets are kept safely at home.