North by North,,, Huh?

I turned on North by Northwest for a few minutes while having lunch. I haven't seen the movie in years, but remembered the general gist. It was the part where Grant has been arrested for drunk driving and he takes the police to the house where he was held captive, but everything is different. There's a woman with him who at first I took to be his wife. But then I remembered that Eva Marie Saint is his love interest in the movie, so who was the woman? That's when I heard Grant's character refer to her as Mother. I thought I must be mistaken, but he said it again. Yes, the woman, played by Jessie Royce Landis, was only eight years older than Grant but cast as his mother. E.M Saint, who played his love interest, was twenty years his junior. Yuck! I don't care how debonair Grant was, just yuck.

I remember watching About Schmidt and being confused by a scene where Nicholson was seated next to a slightly frumpy woman. I thought, they can't possibly have cast her as his mother, can they? But then I realized that she was cast as his wife. It's just so rare to see an aging actor paired with a woman his actual age it threw me off for several seconds. But then they killed the wife character off rather quickly so there wasn't that to worry about anymore.