North By Northwest

Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) is one of Hitchcock's most outstanding achievements, a near-perfect distillation of his cinematic style and penchant for bravura entertainment. Out of this film came pretty much every James Bond adventure, and any number of other action films and thrillers. Its madcap, deliciously complex plotting, however, holds up amazingly well fifty years later, despite innumerable inferior imitations, and the film remains among the best of its type.

Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is a bored, middle-aged Manhattan ad man whose life takes a turn for the unusual when he is kidnapped by a pair of thugs during happy hour. He meets with Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), a menacingly cultured man who seems convinced Thornhill is a man named Caplan, and narrowly escapes death at the hands of his thugs. Thornhill inadvertently finds himself in the midst of a complex CIA scheme - Caplan is an invention of a CIA chief known as "the Professor" (Leo G. Carroll), to throw Vandamm (a freelance criminal selling government secrets to foreign governments) off the trail of an agent - and somehow Thornhill gains Caplan's identity. Thornhill winds up accused of murder, tracked by police, the CIA and Vandamm's goons, and falls for a girl, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) who isn't what seems to be at first, second or even third glance. It all leads to an explosive denouement atop Mt. Rushmore as Thornhill's attempts at survival and Vandamm's scheming comes to a head.

North by Northwest is a no-stops, breakneck thriller, full of innumerable twists, turns, betrayals, double-crosses and revelations, each more absurd and incredible than the last. Ernest Lehman's wonderfully inventive, perfectly-constructed and endlessly witty screenplay keeps things moving at a lightning pace. The plot is set in motion by a stray line by a bar waiter, and quickly builds to wonderfully absurd proportions. As in Hitchcock's earlier spy capers - The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondant and Notorious - the fact of the film's plot (at heart, a rather banal catch the spy story) is not so interesting as how it develops. In this film, Grant's stock broker is ingeniously transformed from a loser mistaken for a super-suave spy, to an actual (if unwitting) hero by film's end - all he needs is the Walther and a Martini and he's James Bond. It's all excrutiatingly absurd, but it works perfectly for that very reason; one doesn't care about the leaps of logic because the whole thing is so damned entertaining.

As usual, Hitchcock excells in set-pieces, and this film featuers some of his very best. The film's most iconic scene is, of course, the six-minute long sequence where Thornhill is buzzed by a crop duster while waiting for a bus. This scene is Hitchcock at his absolute best; with virtually no dialogue and completely without music, he creates an incredibly suspenseful, brilliantly shot sequence - its tertiary relation to the plot hardly prevents it from being a gripping set piece in its own right. The Mt. Rushmore climax, where Roger and Eve dodge Vandamm's thugs, is more conventionally exciting, helped along by Bernard Herrmann's intense, driving score, but manages to almost meet the standard set by the earlier scene. The cinematography, screenplay and music are all perfect, the art direction particularly ingenious - it's really hard to find fault with the movie unless one is looking at from a logical standpoint, which is just silly.

Cary Grant is pitch-perfect as Thornhill, the Hitchcockian Everyman forced into an impossible situation; this is arguably his signature role and he plays it to the hilt, investing the reluctant spy with suave, cynical world-weariness and clipped, witty charm. James Mason easily matches Grant, having some choice dialogue and stealing his every scene through sheer charisma. Mason was often typecast as cultured bad guys, but rarely more affective than here (I exempt Lord Jim, of course); one doesn't mind typecasting when the actor is perfect for it. Eva Marie Saint (On the Waterfront) is wonderfully cast against type as the beautiful, sexy and conflicted Eve - the archetypical "Hitchcock blonde" - and her chemistry with Grant is wonderful. The supporting cast includes fine performances by Hitchcock regular Leo G. Carroll, Martin Landau as Vandamm's chief thug, and Jessie Royce Landis has an amusing bit as Thornhill's exasperated mother. (Also keep an eye out for one of Hitch's most amusing cameos.)

North by Northwest is a near-perfect piece of classic Hollywood entertainment. The only reason it doesn't get a ten is because I wouldn't rate in my personal top five, but such arbitrariness in number ratings should not dissuade you from seeing it ASAP.

Rating: 9/10 - Highest Recommendation