NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Action / Adventure / Crime / Drama

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Cary Grant / Eva Marie Saint / James Mason

Plot

A case of mistaken identity leads to a cat-and-mouse chase with international spies across the country for New York ad man Roger Thornhill.

What I Liked

I first saw “North By Northwest” when I was probably eleven or twelve, and it remains one of my favorite films of the pre-1960s era of film.  A colorful and fast-paced thriller that sends the audience on a winding trek across the United States, this movie is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most action-packed and widely accessible masterpieces.

Cary Grant, one of Hitchcock’s most oft used leading men, was perfectly cast as handsome and sharp-witted New York advertising executive Roger Thornhill.  Rewatching it for the first time in a couple of years last week, I got the feeling that the writers of TV’s “Mad Men” had Grant’s Thornhill in mind when they created the character of Roger Sterling.  Equally well cast is Eva Marie Saint, whose seductive sensuality is never in question, even if her loyalties are.  Her character’s sexual confidence and aggressiveness, bypassing innuendo for straight-up sexual invitations, is downright shocking for a film made in the 1950s.

Miss Saint’s risqué dialogue isn’t the only facet of the film that was ahead of its time.  “North by Northwest” also plays around with the concepts of identity, individualism, and privacy in a way that one would expect from a movie coming out today.  Thornhill loses his own identity as he becomes a pawn in a game of deception played between the U.S. government and a foreign spy.  His individual rights and safety compromised by powers outside of his control, Thornhill at times embraces his anonymity to disappear among the nameless crowds in train stations, hotels, and other public places, going “off the grid” in modern parlance.  Deep down, this is a very paranoid vision of one person’s helplessness in an increasingly impersonal world, but it is disguised in the identity of an exciting and entertaining thrill ride.

What I Didn’t Like

Made in 1959, “North by Northwest” at times feels like an awkward juxtaposition of two different eras of filmmaking.  Cary Grant was already a living legend by this point, an icon of the silver screen whose career stretched decades into the past to the heyday of the studio era.  Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, the film’s sexual dialogue and paranoid themes reflect trends common to films made much later.  The jaunty quips written for Grant come straight out of old school Hollywood and sometimes feel a bit out of place amidst the very modern, very serious events happening around him.  Still, if “North by Northwest” feels like a film stuck between two eras, that’s because it was.  The coming 1960s would be a period of great change in American cinema, and director Alfred Hitchcock was one of those visionaries who helped lead filmmaking out of the old and into the new.

Most Memorable Scene

This movie is filled with some iconic action sequences that remain eye-catching and electrifying all these years later.  Their influence on the later adventure epics by the likes of Lucas, Spielberg, and Cameron are easy to recognize.  None more so than the scene where Grant is chased through corn fields by a dive-bombing crop duster plane.  The scene is fraught with tension and suspense, leaving you wondering “How the hell is he getting out of this one?”  Even if the conclusion of the sequence is a bit silly, it will always be the most famous moment of a very famous film.

My Rating: 5 out of 5