There's treasure everywhere

It's no secret that I love movies, and one of the things I love most about truly great movies is the way they continuously yield little gems of more upon further viewings. A line you didn't really get last time, or a look you didn't notice, or a new way of reading a scene...it's just amazing what little treasures you can dig up. Or, if you're me, you can be knocked on the head by a huge chunk of falling Obvious that somehow managed to miss you in previous viewings.

Case in point: last night I went with a friend to see a showing of North By Northwest, a Hitchcock classic that I've seen maybe 3 or 4 times before, but not for a few years. I've always especially loved Martin Landau's turn as the very menacing henchman Leonard, who's all lanky and intense and protective of his boss, James Mason. The bomb was dropped when I picked up on a line of dialogue that I had somehow always missed: in response to James Mason's questions about why he shouldn't trust Eva Marie Saint, Leonard hisses, "Call it my woman's intuition, if you will." WhatwhatWHAT? How had I never heard that before? And then James Mason teases him about being jealous. What now? Did they mean what I thought they meant?

So I went home and consulted the interwebs and after some digging turned up this 2001 interview with Martin Landau:

"(The role) was written as a henchman," Landau recalls. "I felt there was no reason for him to be in the movie if he was just there doing James Mason's work. When I read the script, I said, my goodness, he certainly wants to get rid of Eva Marie Saint. I played him as a gay guy, but I played it subtly. Well, interesting choice. Now you've got to remember this was the '50s, and people didn't do things like this. A lot of my friends said, 'You're crazy. Play a gay in your first movie!.' I said, 'It's very logical. If he was gay and he had some kind of relationship with Mason's character, he would want to get rid of Eva Marie Saint.'

"Now, I don't think James Mason liked my choice, but Hitchcock did. And (screenwriter) Ernie Lehman added a line ("Call it my women's intuition, if you will.") for what I was doing that wasn't in the original script."

He was playing him queer the whole time! And Hitchcock LOVED IT. How could I have missed it? I mean, come on, could he have made it any more obvious? Apparently I am only now ready for the truth. My love for Martin Landau and ol' Hitch just went up another notch.

So, yeah. Like I said, you just never know what you're going to rediscover when you go back and watch a really good movie.