The Siren hasn't posted anything crabby in a while, so here we go. If you are going to mock someone for gaining precisely the impression that Alfred Hitchcock intended--that a scene was shot on location, not a set--it's wise to have your own facts in order.
The folks at the Corner were making merry today quoting this exchange, reported by the AP:
[Obama] did express curiosity about the filming of a chase scene in “North by Northwest,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint that included a death-defying scramble over Rushmore’s presidential faces.
“How did they get up there in the first place?” he asked ranger Wesley Jensen.
“They didn’t. It was a movie set,” Jensen told him.
Trouble is, apparently the AP reporter, and those rushing to quote him, didn't watch the movie very closely, either. Neither Cary Grant nor Eva Marie Saint nor anybody else scrambles over the faces. Between, above and around them, yes. Not over them.
From The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, by Donald Spoto:
'Due to the objection of the government,' Hitchcock later explained, 'we weren't allowed to have any of the figures on the faces even in the interior studio shots...We were told very definitely that we could only have the figures slide down between the heads of the presidents. They said that after all, this is the shrine of democracy.'
This edict was issued while the company was, in fact, on location in Rapid City, getting authentic background shots as well as inserts for the cafeteria scene. After initial huffiness about the very notion of the chase scene, the Department of the Interior gave permission "to use mock-ups of the Mount Rushmore faces 'on condition that only the shoulder, or below the chinline' was used in close-up shots involving live actors."
So, boys and girls, Senator Obama was not the only person who was persuaded by Mr. Hitchcock that he saw something he didn't.
Hitchcock had such trouble getting the National Park Service to cooperate that Spoto says he later had a credit thanking them removed from the picture.