Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest came out in July 1959 and quickly became the gold standard of spy thrillers. Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, a Manhattan ad man mistaken for a government spy and chased across the country by people who want him dead. Eva Marie Saint plays Eve Kendall, the blonde he meets on the train.
Saint died Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 102, and at the time of her death she was the oldest living Academy Award winner. She won her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in On the Waterfront. She kept working for the next six decades, playing Martha Kent in Superman Returns as recently as 2006.
But if you ask most film fans to pick the Saint moment they can quote from memory, it's this one from North by Northwest.
Their first scene together is in the dining car. Her character has just paid a steward five dollars to seat Cary Grant at her table. He asks if that's a proposition. She says a line that got Hitchcock in trouble with the censors.
Watch the moment here.
The Scene
Well into the film, Thonhill has not had an easy time of it. Here, he is on the run, having fled New York after being framed for a murder at the United Nations. He's taken the 20th Century Limited bound for Chicago. In the dining car, a woman he's never met waves him over to her table.
He sits, and the conversation is immediately flirtatious. He comments on how lucky it is that he was seated with her. She says it wasn't luck, and that she arranged it.
"I tipped the steward five dollars to seat you here if you should come in," she says.
"Is that a proposition?" he asks.
She demurs. "I never discuss love on an empty stomach."
"You've already eaten."
"But you haven't," she says.
Thonhill finally asks for her name, which she gives. He tells her a fake name, but she calls him out immediately. She knows who he is, and that he's on the run.
This introduces Eve Kendall and sets up the movie's full romantic premise. It's an extremely forward conversation and scandalous for the time.
Eve has her reasons for being so forward. The audience learns later that she's working with the villain Vandamm, and later still that she's actually a double agent working for U.S. intelligence, but what matters in this scene is the posture. She knows what she wants, and she's honest about it.
What you hear when Saint says, "I never discuss love on an empty stomach," though, isn't what she actually said on set. The scene was shot once, with a very different word in the middle, before the studio got involved and sent her back to loop it.
Credit: MGM
The Line She Really Said
The original line, as filmed, was "I never make love on an empty stomach." Hitchcock and screenwriter Ernest Lehman wrote it that way. Saint shot it that way.
The studio censors said no way. Too much.
The scene was already in the can, so the fix was a post-production dub. Saint was called back to overdub a single word, "discuss," over "make."
Per Saint's own narration in the 2000 documentary Hitchcock: The Making of North by Northwest, if you watch the scene carefully or with the sound off, you can see her mouth form "make," not "discuss."
"I never make love on an empty stomach" is funny and direct. "I never discuss love on an empty stomach" is maybe funnier and dirtier because it's so coy.
It could be argued that the dub makes Eve more interesting. She isn't just available. She's smart about being available. We love Hollywood quotes that broke the Hays Code, and this somehow still manages to.
Why the Line Is So Good
The dub still works with a new word because almost nothing else about the scene softens. The power dynamics in the scene are electric, and the sexual tension never gets a release.
Even the next lines continue the tension.
"You've already eaten."
"But you haven't."
This is Thornhill's attempt to defuse the moment, and it's Eve's answer that reloads it. The follow-up is where the proposition actually gets confirmed.
These lines set the tone for a discussion that only becomes more dangerous and more forward. Eve says it'll be a long night, and she's not very interested in her book. "You know what I mean?" she asks him.
He certainly does. By the time the exchange is over, we all know exactly what she means.
Hitchcock, per Saint's own account, gave her three pieces of direction for the role (via TCM).
"Well, working with Hitch was very different from working with [Elia] Kazan. Kazan is a method director, and I'm a method actress, and had gone to the Actors Studio. Kazan would whisper into your ear, individually, his ideas for the emotional scenes and so forth. Hitchcock gave me three things, three directions.
One, lower your voice. Two, don't use your hands. And three, look directly into Cary Grant's eyes at all times. The last was not difficult at all! It was very strange because—having come from Kazan—it was very strange direction. But the way he did it, the way he said it, I conjured up, in my mind, a kind of sexy, spy lady. And that's what he wanted. And, believe me, that was just, basically, the direction."
Watch the scene with those three rules in mind. The performance sells the line.
If you're a screenwriter watching Saint deliver this line and thinking about how to use what she did, think about subtext. Obviously they get close, but no one says, "Let's have sex." But we all still know.
Think about scenes as a whole. The line is great, but the whole scene is amazing because the tension keeps ratcheting up.
You might face rewrites. Hitchcock and Lehman didn't want to lose "make love." They lost it anyway. The replacement is still sharp and elegant, and maybe even more quoted than the original would have been.
