North by Northwest

So the devious, sexy spy of North by Northwest, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), is trying to elude dupe Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant). She gets a secret call from her evil lover, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), while she and Roger are together and writes down an address for their rendezvous.

She carefully tears off the paper with the address, places it in her purse, and then—ready for this?—walks away without the notepad.

There’s that notepad, just a pencil trick away from exposing that address. Will she remember to bring it with her? Roger is watching!

Alas. She walks away.

Will she remember before she sneaks away? Of course, right? It was just a momentary oversight, her wits clouded by the sexiness of her target, Roger.

We see her pick up several other things.

(Oh, that sly Hitchcock.)

Then she leaves the room, SANS NOTEPAD.

Roger, having watched five minutes of television/film in his life, of course knows the pencil trick. He holds the paper this way and that….(Why? What does he think he’ll see?)

He takes out his pencil. He does the trick pant-less (in a kind gesture of Hitchcock’s, who knows his female fans).

There the address is. The super-secret address Eve was so anxious to hide.

How long have you known this trick?  Were you six? Maybe seven? I’m pretty sure Encyclopedia Brown taught me. It’s the kind of spy craft a child can understand and appears in every detective/noir/suspense film or TV episode that assumes its audience is young/dumb/abysmally ignorant of pop culture. Frankly, I would have thought such a plot device beneath Hitchcock. But he never did like giving his heroines much credit, so of course, this spy who has supposedly fooled JAMES MASON must be outsmarted by a different man. Who has a background in….advertising. And lives with his mother.

Yes, our sexy spy was outfoxed by a trick that Micky Mouse might have taught me in the 80s, back when Disney was hawking his image on magic trick books, and I thought that a wand that lifted a playing card with a hidden piece of string was really something.

True, the pencil maneuver wasn’t QUITE as old of a trick when Hitchcock used it, but it wasn’t exactly fresh in 1959. (Though, as my friend points out, today it might become new again, with so few people using pencils.)

I used to roll my eyes when I saw this pencil-and-notepad trick, annoyed by the lazy writing. But now I laugh. Because the Coens offered a send-up of this trite scenario in their—appropriately enough—satire of/tribute to The Big Sleep, The Big Lebowski. The Dude tries to outsmart a villain using the pencil trick. His excitement is intense at his own cleverness. But alas for the Dude, the “secret” isn’t what he expected. If you are of delicate sensibility, I wouldn’t advise it, but if you don’t mind some crude humor, enjoy this film clip and Jeff Bridges’ brilliance in it. (Watch that loopy run of his! And his “just acting natural” look at the end!)

There are many, many jokes about detectives in The Big Lebowksi. One of the most evident is that unlike those brilliant sleuths who with scant clues manage to figure out everything, the Dude can’t figure out anything—the mystery, which people are manipulating him, where his rug is. And unlike the driven fictional detectives who will sacrifice anything for the job, the Dude is pathologically lazy, sharing with them only some loose sense of ethics, questionable associates, and a love for alcohol (but with the Dude, of course, it’s not a hardboiled choice like whisky, but instead White Russians).

Yes, the Dude is not a good detective, and would be an even worse spy. But guess what, Hitchcock?

Even the Dude knows the pencil trick.