‘I’m Eve Kendall. I’m 26 and unmarried. Now you know everything.”
Not quite everything. That is the famously succinct introduction given in a swaying dining car in a voice creamy with insinuation. Eve is speaking to Cary Grant’s fugitive ad man Roger Thornhill, wrongly accused of murder and hiding out from the cops on a train from New York to Chicago in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North By Northwest. Eve is going to hide him in her compartment because she wants to have sex with him, and much later that train of theirs is to symbolically enter a tunnel. But is that the whole story? Eve’s amazingly beautiful, enigmatic face encodes a secret.
She is of course played by Eva Marie Saint, a star whose three names each hinted in their ways at purity and piety; they gave this stylish, assured performer a hint of something respectable, even prim that the passion could work against.
It was a combination that Hitchcock found irresistible and Saint found immortality in her most famous role – as the demurest and coolest of cool customers, an arctically radiant blonde goddess of mystery who outrageously comes on to Cary Grant with some of the airily sexy entitlement that Grace Kelly had in To Catch a Thief, a little of the secret sadness of Kim Novak from Vertigo or the damage of Tippi Hedren in Marnie. Hitchcock’s instructions to Saint were to lower her voice, not use her hands and look into Grant’s eyes at all times. The resulting stylisation made Eve an intensely realised persona, almost a hypnotic trance subject, but very charismatic.
Eva Marie Saint was a gorgeous fashion plate in that approved Hitchcockian style of Bergdorf Goodman department store chic, stopping just short of matronly. She showcased the gowns, coats, long gloves, discreet necklaces, rose-pink lipstick and perhaps most lusciously of all, the thick wavy curtain of blond hair. And here is where Eva Marie Saint had something distinctive to offer that leading lady template: the chaotic scene at the art auction where heartbroken Thornhill confronts Eve who is now sitting with her sinister sugar-daddy boyfriend and anti-American spymaster Vandamm, played by James Mason. Vandamm places his hand on the back of her neck, creepily disarranging, just slightly, her blondeness – an unpleasant and unexpectedly real image of what we would now call coercive control. Then we get a closeup of Eve’s eyes brimming with tears of wretchedness and fear. It is a great moment which Saint delivered with style.
The Hitchcock Blonde was a persona Saint inhabited with the technical assurance of a player in Japanese kabuki theatre. She had come up through TV live drama in which she was an Emmy award-winner, demonstrated a formidable ability to emote on cue and she even played in a musical version for live TV of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. TV showed what a trouper Eva Marie Saint was – an actor who could play wacky musical comedy when she was allowed to, as she did in That Certain Feeling (1956) opposite Bob Hope. But the movies always wanted something more serious, more glacial and more passionate from her.
She got her Oscar (for best supporting actress) for her previous film, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), which gave us a much more plausible and real figure in a tough gritty drama – precisely the kind of drama that Hitchcock wanted her to get away from. She played Edie, the lovely, gentle, schoolgirlish kid sister of the murdered dockworker, and Marlon Brando’s tough ex-boxer Terry falls poignantly in love with her. Edie is tough in her own way, demanding answers about her brother’s death and she is part of what shames Terry into action. Even here, she looks classy, the very image of the librarian or schoolteacher that she is surely destined to be.
As her career progressed in the 60s, and her style of femininity became unfashionable, and she in any case wanted to prioritise her family over the breakneck pace of a Hollywood career, Saint tended to take the roles of wives and helpmeets, playing them with dignity and restraint but also her own refinement of passion. She was Richard Burton’s wife in The Sandpiper, hurt by his infatuation with a sexy free spirit played by Liz Taylor and also the wronged wife in A Hatful of Rain (1957), whose troubled husband is effectively cheating on her with his addiction. She is the nurse in the epic Exodus (1960), whose destiny is to cross with Paul Newman’s as he battles to create the state of Israel (Saint endured with good humour the indignity of having to kiss Otto Preminger on location, the director claiming he was trying to demonstrate to Newman the way she should be kissed). She was the nurse also in the mystery suspenser 36 Hours (1965) opposite James Garner.
Saint worked with John Frankenheimer who also valued that distinct intensity and maturity in her beauty and style. She was the American journalist who falls for Yves Montand’s race-car driver in Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix in 1966 and perhaps deserves more attention for her performance in Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down in 1962; she plays a young woman not unlike her Edie from On the Waterfront who falls for a violent, misogynist abuser played by Warren Beatty, gets pregnant by him and tragically seeks out her own terrible fate while somehow redeeming him. In Loving (1970), she arrived at what could be called her “later” phase, playing another wronged wife, this time married to a sleazy philanderer, played by George Segal.
Saint never became an A-list superstar, and it was not in any case what she wanted: but in North By Northwest she achieved a timeless moment of movie mystique that eludes many A-listers: the sensual, self-possessed Eve as mysteriously sexual as that Freudian image of the train disappearing into the tunnel’s darkness.
