From New York to Chicago, the Great Plains to Mount Rushmore, and Beyond

We know: it's a bit of a cliché to say that a movie's setting is a character in its own right. But that cliché never rang truer than in the case of North by Northwest.

The film's trailer makes it clear: in it, Hitch is a tour guide promoting cross-country vacations, and he lists the great sites spectators will get to visit all for the price of a single movie ticket.

North by Northwest's settings deliver a sweeping sense of the American way of life, perceived to be under threat during the Cold War era when the film's set. (See our "Themes" section for more on that.) We visit a couple of the country's great cities—New York and Chicago—as well as two familiar landmarks: the United Nations and Mount Rushmore. And, of course, there's the extended sequence in the middle of Nowhere, Indiana (actually shot in California), where nowhere stretches to the horizon as Thornhill waits and waits for the man who never comes.

As we discuss in our "Symbols" section, Hitchcock enjoyed using familiar or famous places in his films, because he could upend the viewers' expectations by imbuing them with elements of suspense and danger, taking a benign setting and making it the scene of a murder or kidnapping. In fact, in the original trailer, Hitchcock himself appeared as a travel agent promoting a guided vacation tour of the U.S. starting in New York and ending with the "serene nobility of Mount Rushmore."

You know what he wanted to do with all that serene nobility: get rid of both the serenity and the nobility.

But how on earth did he manage to get permission to film those scenes at the U.N. and Mount Rushmore?

Simple answer: he didn't.

Head over to our "Production Design" section to see what happened.