North by Northwest  

 

Year: 1959.

Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau.

Production: Alfred Hitchcock, Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

Screenplay: Ernest Lehman.

Photography: Robert Burks (Technicolor).

Music: Bernard Herrmann.

Duration: 136 min.

Color: color.

Cast:

Argument:
Roger Thornhill, an important publicity agent, is held accidentally for somebody called George Kaplan, an unexisting spy invented by an american counterspy service.

Philip Vandamm, an enemy secret agent, with aid from his sinister comrade Leonard, is trying to make George Kaplan vanish, so Thornhill will be involved in a series of dangerous situations and continuous pursuits, in which he will have to use of all his intelligence and own resources to escape death.

While in this trouble, Thornhill will know an attractive woman, Eve Kendall, with whom he will initiate a short romance. She's a misterious woman who works for that american counterspy service, and who will have to betray Thornhill in order to maintain her identity in secret.

Thornhill will finally manage to escape alive with Eve at the movie's final stage on Mount Rushmore.

This is one of the most known movies of Alfred Hitchcock, and probably the one in which humour has a more important part; it should be noted the way in which this sense of humour and suspense are mixed in this movie; therefore the presence of Cary Grant, one of the most famous comedy actors in the United States in the 50's.

This film, in spite of many of Hitchcock's ones, has got a wide variety of scenarios (New York, Chicago, Rapid City, etc...) and thus we shall remark the film's final part on Mount Rushmore. As the title says, the direction followed by Thornhill on his escape from New York to Mount Rushmore will be exactly north by northwest.

In this movie, we may observe a change in the way suspense is caused by Hitchcock in the viewer; here the main suspense isn't a sort of mistery or the identity of a murderer, but the answer to the following question: Will Roger Thornhill be able to demonstrate his real identity? Everybody will recognize that in some stages the tension caused by this injustice is considerable.

Another important stroke in this movie is the action: since the beginning we dive in the exciting world of spies and secret agents, full of pursuits, fights, etc... not to forget the scene where the flying machine tries to kill Roger Thornhill, or should I call him George Kaplan?...