The film term “MacGuffin” was coined by British screenwriter Angus MacPhail, who worked with Alfred Hitchcock, and was popularized by Hitchcock himself. The word is defined by Merriam-Webster as “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.” As the plot progresses, the MacGuffin may be minimized or even forgotten. It has been derisively referred to as a “plot coupon,” and Hitchcock once remarked that it is actually “nothing at all.”
With this programming, TCM hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Eddie Muller will further define the MacGuffin and look at a half-dozen examples of films that depend upon the plot device. Suitably, three of these movies are Hitchcock thrillers where the MacGuffin is the reason for the suspense to occur.
In The 39 Steps (1935) it is the plan for an advanced airplane engine as stored in the memory of a vaudeville performer. In Psycho (1960) the “nothing” is a packet of stolen money that the Janet Leigh character takes with her on her fateful visit to the Bates Motel. And in North by Northwest (1959) it is government secrets on a roll of microfilm that places Cary Grant in great danger of the sinister James Mason.
In non-Hitchcock films, perhaps the most famous MacGuffin of them all is the title object of The Maltese Falcon (1941). It’s the fabled piece of art that many of the characters are seeking in this classic film noir directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart.
A close runner-up is “Rosebud” in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). It is the final word from the lips of the dying Charles Foster Kane (Welles), and its meaning isn’t revealed until the ending of this celebrated film. On the off chance that anyone reading this hasn’t seen the movie, it won’t be revealed here!
In Casablanca (1942), the iconic wartime romance in which Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman play star-crossed lovers, the MacGuffin is the coveted “letters of transit” that allow free travel through Nazi-occupied countries. The letters form the catalyst that seals the couple’s fate – even though such letters were a fictional invention that did not exist in reality.
Filmmakers have continued to employ MacGuffins in contemporary movies. Here are a few notable examples through the decades: the robot R2-D2 in the original Star Wars film (1977); “Project Genesis,” the life-enabling research project in the Star Trek movies of the mid-1980s; Private Ryan himself in Saving Private Ryan (1998); the object code-named “Rabbit’s Foot” in Mission: Impossible III (2006); and the mysterious death of the crime novelist played by Christopher Plummer in Knives Out (2019).
To further clarify (or confuse) the subject, Hitchcock liked to tell this story: “A man says, ‘Well, what is a MacGuffin? You say, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ Man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ Then you say, ‘Then that’s no MacGuffin!’”
By Roger Fristoe
