Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Ernest Lehman

Running time: 2 hrs 51 mins

Genre: Action/Adventure/Suspense



CRITIQUE:


Let’s put this forward straight. Hitchcock’s suspenser North By Northwest is an influential piece of cinema. Not only did it set the template for many action movies of the twenty-first century (see the James Bond franchise, or perhaps the more recent paranoid thrillers such as Eagle Eye), it had also established the man-on-the-run plot device that is de rigueur to the spy genre. There’s no denying that this is bravura filmmaking, capturing truly iconic scenes – including the jetplane chase on a vast cornfield, the fugitive-in-the-train sequence and the Mt. Rushmore climax – and it is gorgeously, innovatively photographed. Hitchcock, meticulous with his camera, pans, tilts, zooms and cranes his frames in glorious delight, giving a light-hearted nuance to his otherwise dark material of double-crossing, mistaken identities and duplicitous blondes. And this is really where North By Northwest staggers with flaws. Forget what the critics are saying: this one is loaded with overfamiliarity. It seems as though Hitchcock reiterates himself with this thriller, and anyone who has seen his black-and-white romcom action caper The 39 Steps would sense some déjà-vu. Both featured protagonists accused with erroneous personalities, cross-country getaways, trains, blonde bombshells, comic crescendos and plots as thick as soup. Cary Grant delivers a suave and effortlessly charming presence to his Manhattanite ad exec Thornhill and Eva Marie Saint is superlative as the ice-cold Eve Kendall – but has the proverbial character interplay starkly reminiscent of many other couples of Hitchcock’s canon. Vertigo, anyone?



VERDICT:

There’s no doubt North By Northwest is suspense-packed and impressively shot, but this feels like a blood brother to The 39 Steps and the first cousin of Vertigo. It’s an entertaining caper but thematically weary.



RATING: B+