Eva Marie Saint’s stolen glances

The ‘Saint’ in her name was authentic, but not really necessary. She was born on 4 July 1924 in New Jersey, the child of Quakers, with a mother also named Eva Marie Saint. As she lived to the age of 102, it wasn’t hard to think of her as decent, good-looking but good, too, honest, honourable, a modest assistant to so many ventures, but someone who, just because of her pale, quiet virtue and reliability, might have been overlooked.

That is all very well, but then there is casting, and Alfred Hitchcock. There are few proofs more gentle and persuasive of how Hitch adored women while being a little afraid of his feeling for them than his asking Saint to play Eve Kendall in North by Northwest.

Eve is two-faced, a bewitching figure in a perilous masquerade. But that set-up requires her to behave like a polite, enigmatic seductress – to be the sort of stranger so many think of encountering on a train, to be the dream that does not require the awed watcher to fall asleep. She is a fantasy done in life. She is the kind of movie star who can whisper to the man, without moving her lips, well, of course I know who you are and what you want and, yes, of course, I am here to fulfil the hopes you are too shy to put into words. So don’t bother trying to ask me, just pucker your mouth and kiss me. Isn’t it a marvel what mouths can do?

This is 1959, when the people in pictures behaved very carefully – at least on screen – and did not seem interested in a world where people might do it (I mean do it), because the whole enterprise and culture were devoted to imagining doing it. But that distancing is utterly Hitchcock (who must have heard the sly poetry in his own name) and part of the magical way in which respectable, sophisticated entertainments could be so casually erotic that the so-called censors might have been retired as deaf and blind.

So the meeting on the train, its innuendo and its glances, turns upon the way – just for Roger O. Thornhill and us – Ms Kendall is going to do it, without a flicker of shame or responsibility. Let’s face it – and it is palpably face to face – this may be the most voyeuristic treasure in the history of film. With an actress so unlikely that the business must have wondered, ‘Why would Hitch cast her?’

Did the director relish that he was challenging fixed attitudes? Did he even ask that Ernest Lehman’s script call Kendall Eve so that Ms Saint might feel a tremor of being freed to be wicked? North by Northwest is not simply a romantic adventure, and a witty piece of preposterous intrigue. It is a film in which Roger O. (such a rotter) gets a sentimental education so thorough he may become a decent man. It’s a chess game where the queen is a whore practising her betrayals – the very opposite of sainthood. So Eve is vividly portrayed as the slave to James Mason’s character, a woman who has let him possess her in touches to shiver over (remember his hand on her neck). We are left to imagine how in the story’s subterfuge she has yielded to his suave cruelty. Amid the cockeyed espionage, she has suffered real damage and been in moral jeopardy. The saint has been compromised.

What I’m suggesting is that North by Northwest hangs on not just Hitch’s adoration of women, but his secretive need to punish them for being so attractive to him. In an era when Hitch was gradually undressing his own sexual obsessions, Eve Kendall is his most provocative and veiled goddess. He teased Saint on set about lifting her free from humble realism. He personally took her to Bergdorf Goodman to buy her smart clothes. All of this attention (and respect) made her feel loftier or more like a star. But beneath that veneer she was playing a woman it was dangerous to trust. Doesn’t she shoot deadly blanks at Roger, as if she wants to kill the way she has disappointed him? They end famously in a tunnel of love, but can there be trust between them?

A hidden scenario opens up. What will become of those two after the chase? Imagine a sequel never made: Roger makes Eve Mrs Thornhill. They are neither of them exactly young: he is 55, she is 35. But let’s say they have their lives before them. They may settle down in all the recommended ways. But he has married a consummate actress and so he can never quite trust her. This may turn into a rare screwball comedy of misunderstanding in which two lovers engage in an eternal dance where the sweetest gestures may seem like lies.

Of course, Eva Marie Saint worked on into the 21st century. There must be a hundred credits, done diligently and without vanity. Yes, you’re right, she won the supporting actress Oscar for On the Waterfront – everyone knows that, and overlooks the implausible role of a sister who falls in love with the guy who set up her brother’s murder. She is very touching as the woman in 36 Hours – a concentration camp inmate drawn into a Nazi plot. She is plainly stricken with Warren Beatty in All Fall Down. She stood in place as the non-Jewish observer in Exodus. I like her wounded look in The Stalking Moon. She was with E.G. Marshall in the original TV version of Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night, and …

Well, it’s not so easy to say more. The full list makes it hard to see her career as anything other than exemplary, professional, and uninteresting. That is not said to be hurtful or disrespectful. It’s more a way of suggesting that North by Northwest is a suddenly unique, surreal masterpiece in which her stolen glances run wild. Eve Kendall will never be forgotten.