BIG'S BIG MOVIE LIST

     I've seen “Psycho”, I've seen “Dial M For Murder”, and I caught the majority of “The Birds” one lazy afternoon many years ago. This exposure, coupled with my limited knowledge of his other mothers such as “Rear Window” led me to think that his work was relegated to horror and some mystery. I grew up watching Ole' Al walk into the silhouette to his trademark music on Nick at Nite, and while I never watched the show itself, I always naturally assumed the show was about killers and bungled diamond heists. “North By Northwest” is the clear counter to this idea, breaking into a more action laden thriller while still retaining the Hitchcock mystery pizzaz.

 

   Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) (The O. doesn't stand for anything, like the O in David O. Selznik) is a high-powered advertising executive in New York in the fifties. He's a slightly atypical Madison Avenue jag: he likes booze, is twice divorced, and seems to really love his mother (and peforms a few heinous audio dubs early in the film). He is in the middle of a business dinner, when he is whisked away by two thugs with concealed weapons without explanation. He is brought to a stately manse in the country, where a man claiming to be Lester Townsend attempts to pump Thornhill for information, mistaking him for a secret agent named George Kaplan.

 

   In an attempt to eliminate “Kaplan”, Townsend's goons pour a full bottle of Bourbon down Roger's throat and bring him to a rocky cliffside road, where they plan to leave him behind the wheel of a Mercedes and let the car roll off the road and onto the rocky coast below. Roger manages to pull himself together just enough to crash the car and get himself arrested, only when he brings his detectives to the mansion the next day, nothing is as it was the night before, and the lady of the house is participating in a ruse whereby Roger is made out to be a drunken party guest that stole a car and attempted to drive home drunk. As Roger continues to investigate these mysterious circumstances and uncover the identity of the elusive Kaplan, he unravels a web of espionage, lies, murder, and intrigue that leads him on a cross-country journey full of perils, pitfalls, and Eva Saint Marie.

 

 

The film is very good. Very Hitchcock in the displays of light and shadow as well as his interesting angles and use of architecture and design in his cinematography. The overarching mystery of the story is compelling, and the female love interest is incredibly charming (despite the fact that Eva Saint Marie was a semi-creepy twenty years younger than the 55 year old Cary Grant at the time of filming and his dialog toward her is often misogynistic and clumsy). The cornfield airplane scene is awesome and unmistakably classic, and even despite the complexity of the overall story, everything is brought together nicely. The American Film Institute dubbed it 7 in the Top 10 Greatest Mysteries and the AFI #55 Greatest Movie of All Time and #63 on the IMDb top 250, all deserving numbers by my estimate.