But I wanna talk about Eva, and Eve.
Eve Kendall is the protagonist of her own picture: the story of a party girl at a crossroads, pressured by the government into an undercover assignment. (Another recurring Hitchcock type: Eve would have an interesting conversation with NOTORIOUS' Alicia Huberman.) She seems close enough to Philip Vandamm to know the trouble that George Kaplan is causing him, and must have raised an eyebrow when George Kaplan suddenly had a face, splashed over the newspapers. Perhaps she puts on the same face she always wore for Vandamm when she runs into Roger Thornhill on the train. She's seductive but icy, intimate but not easy to know. Roger doesn't understand quite why this incredible woman is helping him. And Eve's poker face is so strong that he doesn't realize how hard she's working to keep him alive.
As breezily as the whole thing moves, it takes a few viewings to really grasp the depth of Eve's story. And keeping all of the above in mind, it's clear that Eva Marie Saint has internalized it all, and behind her fully composed masque she's calculating all the steps she's going to have to take to keep this idiot from being murdered. She starts to crack in the auction house sequence, clearly hurt when Roger expresses his bitterness over what he believes to be her betrayal (and probably frustrated and angry) and trying to keep her emotions at bay. (She's keeping it inside, but she's dancing every bit as hard as Roger.)
There's a relief that comes when Roger and Eve meet face-to-face in some Keystone forest, at last on the same page and at the same point in time. Though surrounded by thick trees they finally, truly see each other. They're still beset by an incredibly hostile and dangerous world, reflected in the increasingly distorted and disturbed faces of Mount Rushmore they must scale during the movie's climax, but even in this moment, maybe the most traumatized expression by Hitchcock of a world in chaos and uproar, Roger and Eve are finally dancing together.
