North by Northwest is considered by many film critics to be the epitome of Hitchcock\u2019s suspense movies.\u00a0 It has several iconic scenes and involves several high-powered Hollywood stars being choreographed through a very intricate and confusing plot about spies and murder that has a love story embedded in the middle.\u00a0 But I\u2019ve always thought it was a bit much.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost a send-up of some of his earlier stuff.<\/p>\n
The plot revolves around a New York advertising executive, Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant, being mistaken by a gang of Soviet spies for an American agent named George Kaplan who we find out later doesn\u2019t actually exist.\u00a0 Thornhill is kidnapped and brought to an estate on Long Island where he is given a choice; provide the Russian spies with information or be liquidated.\u00a0 Thornhill adamantly maintains that he isn\u2019t Kaplan and so they proceed with the murder.\u00a0 They force Thornhill to drink a quart of bourbon and then put him behind the wheel of a car heading for a cliff.\u00a0 But Thornhill manages to drunk-drive the car along a steep curving country road without crashing and eventually he is arrested by the local police.\u00a0 After this there is a great deal of confusion as Thornhill attempts to find the men who attempted to kill him.\u00a0 He next finds himself at the UN Building looking for the ringleader but instead he is somehow framed for the murder of a diplomat.<\/p>\n
While trying to escape arrest by the NYPD, Thornhill next jumps aboard the 20th Century Limited, a luxury train that travels to Chicago where \u201cKaplan\u201d has an appointment. On the train he meets Eve Kendall, played by Eva Marie Saint, and they begin a romance while she manages to hide him from the police.\u00a0 But we are shown that secretly she is working with the Russian spies.\u00a0 Eve pretends to get in touch with Kaplan for Thornhill and tells him to meet Kaplan at a rural Illinois bus stop that is surrounded by cornfields.\u00a0 No one shows up until finally a crop-dusting biplane chases Thornhill and starts firing machine gun slugs at him.\u00a0 Eventually the plane somehow crashes into a fuel tanker truck and Thornhill escapes back to Chicago in a stolen vehicle.<\/p>\n
Now he confronts Eve with her spy friends at a fine arts auction.\u00a0 He discovers that his nemesis is named Phillip Vandamm, played with his usual suave style by James Mason.\u00a0 And he discovers that Vandamm is Eve\u2019s lover.\u00a0 In order to escape from Vandamm\u2019s henchmen Thornhill comically heckles the auctioneers and is finally ejected by the police.\u00a0 Thornhill tells the police that he is the wanted killer and they drive off to the local precinct.\u00a0 But during the drive a radio call comes in and Thornhill is driven instead to the airport where a government agent called the \u201cThe Professor,\u201d played by Leo G. Carroll takes custody of Thornhill and flies him to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.\u00a0 The Professor explains that Eve is acting as a government agent to provide information on Vandamm\u2019s espionage ring.\u00a0 But Thornhill has endangered her cover by falling in love with her and making Vandamm suspicious of her loyalty.<\/p>\n
Thornhill confronts Vandamm and Eve at the airport.\u00a0 He tells Vandamm that he really is the American agent Kaplan and he will allow Vandamm to escape in exchange for taking Eve into custody to punish her for her duplicitous behavior toward him.\u00a0 When Thornhill becomes physical with Eve, she pulls out a small hand gun from her purse and shoots him several times and then flees.<\/p>\n
Later we see the Professor driving into the wooded countryside somewhere in South Dakota and we see that Thornhill is uninjured due to the blanks in Eve\u2019s gun.\u00a0 Eve drives to meet them at this rendezvous point and explains to Thornhill that she must now leave the country with Vandamm on his private plane to complete her mission.\u00a0 When Thornhill attempts to prevent her due to his romantic feelings for her, the Professor\u2019s law enforcement associate punches Thornhill in the face and knocks him out.\u00a0 Late he escapes their custody and heads to Vandamm\u2019s home near the summit of the Mount Rushmore monument to get Eve to abandon the plan.\u00a0 Hiding outside of the home he overhears Vandamm and his henchman Leonard, played with great creepiness by Martin Landau, discussing Eve\u2019s status.\u00a0 Leonard fires Eve\u2019s gun at Vandamm and thus proves it is loaded with blanks.\u00a0 After an initial burst of anger at Leonard Vandamm agrees that he will have to dispose of Eve by throwing her from the plane into a lake.<\/p>\n
Thornhill manages to rescue Eve right before she gets on the plane but they cannot escape the property except by climbing down the face of the monument with Vandamm and his henchmen in hot pursuit.\u00a0 Eventually a sharpshooter\u2019s bullet by the Professor\u2019s rescue party saves Thornhill and Eve from being forced off the shear rock face by Leonard who instead falls to his death.\u00a0 Now that Leonard is no longer crushing Thornhill\u2019s handhold on the cliff he manages to finally pull Eve up from where she is dangling over the abyss.\u00a0 Whereupon the scene changes to Thornhill pulling Eve up to the elevated bed in their railway suite on the 20th Century Limited getting ready to celebrate their honeymoon.<\/p>\n
Okay, so this is Hitchcock at the point in his career where he has gone a little over the top.\u00a0 Humor has become a major part of the feel of the movie.\u00a0 I\u2019ll give some examples.\u00a0 When Cary Grant is driving down the steep curving road drunk, the scene is decidedly comical.\u00a0 And later on, when he is trying to avoid his enemies in the auction hall his demeanor is what you would expect of Cary Grant in a comic role.\u00a0 It\u2019s supposed to be funny.\u00a0 And near the end of the movie where he and Eve are running for their lives away from the spies, when she asks him why his two earlier wives divorced him he deadpans that they thought his life was too boring.\u00a0 This is sort of a comic movie.\u00a0 And that\u2019s not all that different from other movies from this period like Rear Window where comedy is added in.\u00a0 But the improbability of some of the scenes like the crop-duster chasing him through the cornfields and the escape down the faces of the Mt. Rushmore monument makes the movie a little bit like a fantasy.<\/p>\n
But it is entertaining.\u00a0 Personally, I don\u2019t watch this movie very often.\u00a0 I have to be in the right mood.\u00a0 I\u2019d prefer to see Cary Grant in Notorious.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very similar plot but it\u2019s played straight and has a very different feel.\u00a0 But preferences differ and some people probably feel oppositely.\u00a0 It\u2019s still definitely one of Hitchcock\u2019s better films, just not one of my favorites.\u00a0 Still, highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
North by Northwest is considered by many film critics to be the epitome of Hitchcock\u2019s suspense movies.\u00a0 It has several iconic scenes and involves several<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[494,716,2843,2355,2844,2120,1383,43,38,1355],"class_list":["post-13134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-alfred-hitchcock","tag-cary-grant","tag-eva-marie-saint","tag-james-mason","tag-leo-g-carroll","tag-martin-landau","tag-mount-rushmore","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\n