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North by Northwest: The Vandamm House

Or how Alfred Hitchcock and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put a Frank Lloyd Wright house on top of Mount Rushmore in spite of common sense, Frank Lloyd Wright and the United States Government. Sort of.

To understand how the Vandamm house came into “existence”, you have to understand the main point of “North by Northwest”. The complexities of the famous plot aside, it is about a man who is surrounded by the trappings of wealth, power and prestige - none of which are of any use to him whatever in his incredible adventure.

“North by Northwest’s” hero, Roger Thornhill, is a Madison Avenue ad man who is abducted when he is mistaken for a spy. He’s kidnapped from the least likely place on the planet - right out from under the Everett Shinn murals in the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel. Having made the point that even the safety of the most famous hotel in New York was useless to his film’s hero, Hitchcock went on to surround Roger Thornhill with example after example of late-1950’s luxury, and kept hammering the point that none of it did Thornhill any good. The assassins take Thornhill to the Phipps Estate on Long Island in a Cadillac limousine. He’s nearly killed later in a Mercedes roadster. He escapes back to the Plaza, then to the new United Nations Building. His adventures take him to Chicago via the Twentieth Century Limited, where he meets a female spy who possesses a Bergdorf Goodman wardrobe, a ruby necklace from Van Cleef & Arpels, and a new 1958 Lincoln Continental Mark III convertible. From there, Thornhill’s adventures culminate in a visit to Mount Rushmore, where he finds the mastermind behind the assassins in a luxurious Modernist eyrie built almost on top of the monument.

The Vandamm house was a problem - or, rather, multiple problems. First was that it had to fulfill the recognition requirement; the house had to reek of sophistication and luxury. Second, it almost had to be a Modernist house; the rocky hills of South Dakota didn’t lend themselves to traditional architecture. And third, it had to be a Modernist house that was obviously in the same class of expensive good taste as the Plaza and the ruby necklace and the Lincoln and the Twentieth Century Limited. Hitchcock knew that there was only one way to fill these requirements - a Frank Lloyd Wright house. He ran into trouble almost immediately.

The biggest was that Frank Lloyd Wright was expensive, even by Hollywood standards. read more