North by Northwest is generally regarded as one of Alfred Hitchcock's best films. It is certainly one of his most purely entertaining and it also marks the fourth and final collaboration between the director and leading man Cary Grant. Whenever I watch this movie I am always struck by the opening credits. The words are shown in slanted block letters against the side of a glass skyscraper in which the reflection of the traffic on the Manhattan streets below can be seen. After forty-five years this title sequence by the legendary Saul Bass seems as fresh and modern now as when it first came out. Hitchcock, who appears in a cameo in nearly all his movies, is seen waiting for -and missing- a bus in a brief moment of screen time, then the story proper begins.
Cary Grant is Roger Thornhill, a sophisticated -and very well-tailored- New York advertising executive who finds himself unexpectedly caught up in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with a nefarious group of spies, who mistakenly believe him to be George Kaplan, a covert government agent. An agent, by the way, who doesn't really exist. He was created by the CIA as a decoy and they are only too thrilled when they discover that their fictitious agent has suddenly sprung to life. He is kidnapped at gunpoint in the middle of a power lunch, taken to a mansion out on Long Island, forced to drink an entire bottle of bourbon and then sent to his presumed death behind the wheel of a stolen car. He somehow manages to survive only to find himself wanted for the murder of an important American diplomat at the U.N. building. He flees town in a train where he meets the beautiful femme fatale Eve Kendall, played by Eva Marie Saint. Like all Hitchcock women she is a blond ice goddess. Anyway she saves Grant from being discovered by the police by hiding him in her stateroom. They head to Chicago where she sends Grant to that fateful crossroad in the middle of nowhere, where (in one of the most famous sequences ever committed to film) he gets chased by a crop dusting plane. So just whose side is this mysterious woman on anyway? The answer to that question leads to the movie's iconic climax on Mount Rushmore.
This was the perfect part for Cary Grant. He could play the sophisticated New Yorker in his sleep, and at fifty-five he was still in great shape and seemed only to get more handsome as he got older. Eva Marie Saint, for her part, gives her second most famous performance. Her most celebrated role is as Brando's girlfriend in On the Waterfront. James Mason is perfect as Phillip Vandamm, the bad guy that she must pretend to be in love with. He had such a distinctive voice and way of speaking. Like Grant he was adept at playing the sophisticate but with a decidedly sinister edge. A young Martin Landau rounds out the main cast as one of Mason's henchmen. His most famous moment comes when he sadistically steps on Cary Grant's fingers as Cary dangles precariously with one hand from atop the historical monument while holding on to Eva Marie Saint with his other hand.
Nobody built and maintained suspense like Hitchcock. And though that statement has long since become a cliché, it is nonetheless true. North by Northwest was made at the absolute peak of his talents.
