340. North By Northwest (1959)

Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

Synopsis

Cary Grant gets mistaken for some government spy. HE also gets accused of murder, so he has to run away form Vandamm (not Jean-Claude) and the police, while trying to shag this spy girl.


Review

Hitchcock does good again. In North by Northwest he brings us a film that is not nearly as dark as Vertigo, but that is great fun to watch. If we ignore the mistaken identity bits it could almost be a very good Bond film, spectacular locations, romance with spies, wisecracking sexual jokes, villains from some undefined organisation, ending the film with a roll in the hay, getting the girl etc.

So it is a lighter fare, as you want a Cary Grant film to be. An Affair to Remember was a heavy Grant film... and we all know it's shit. Hitchcock always manages to amuse me to no end, however, there are little funny details spread throughout the film which really reward close viewing, from the Hitchcock cameo to Grant crossing a woman's room at the hospital, to the mischievous Freudian final scene.

Well, I still have not seen a Hitchcock film I disliked, all of them I have loved and always on more than one level, funny, cruel, suspenseful and frustrating all at the same time seem to be his hallmarks and he always manage to make them work perfectly together.


Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The plot of this film is one of the purer versions of Alfred Hitchcock's idea of the "MacGuffin", the physical object that everyone in the film is chasing after but which has no deep relationship to the plot. Late in North by Northwest, it emerges that the spies are attempting to smuggle microfilm containing government secrets out of the country. They have been trying to kill Thornhill, who they believe to be the agent on their trail, "George Kaplan". Indeed, the fictitious Kaplan himself could be the "MacGuffin" of the film as Thornhill, as well as the villains, spend most of the movie vainly trying to track him down.

There are similarities between this movie and Hitchcock's earlier film Saboteur (1942), whose final scene on top of the Statue of Liberty foreshadows the Mount Rushmore scene in the later film. In fact, North by Northwest can be seen as the last in a long line of "wrong man" films that Hitchcock made according to the pattern he established in The 39 Steps (1935).

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