Now, quite firmly my all-time favorite Hitchcock movie

Rating: 10/10 (10 August 2015)

I watched my first Hitchcock movie, Psycho, in my last year of high school and I immediately became a fan. Over the following 25 years though I have noticed that my favorite Hitchcock movie has continued to change. It was Psycho for many years, but sometime in the mid- 1990s, it became Vertigo (coincidentally a time when a new restored print of that came out). Apart from the beautiful new print (which I also saw on the big screen), I was probably somewhat also swayed by the Sight & Sound critics poll where Vertigo had just displaced Citizen Kane as the greatest movie of all times.
But, for the past ten years or so, North by Northwest has become my favorite Hitchcock movie of all times. It is the one I find myself watching over and over again (just caught it on the big screen, for a change). It is also the one I find myself recommending to others, when they ask what Hitchcock movie should they start with.
I guess the reason for this is that it is the most "perfect" Hitchcock movie. It has all the elements: the Macguffin, the wrongly-accused leading man, and the blonde woman who may or may not be who she claims to be. More than that, it has in one single movie everything that you will find in separate Hitchcock movies: a great screenplay (by Ernest Lehman), fantastic score (Bernard Herrman, obviously), great title sequence (Saul Bass), crackling dialogue and humor, and great chemistry between the leads (similar to 39 Steps). The interplay between Cary Grant (at his best - and more than Jimmy Stewart, the perfect Hitchcock lead) and Eve Marie Saint when they first meet on the train is an exercise in great writing and acting - it could be from any great romantic movie.
But most of all it has some of the great set-pieces assembled in the movies - the crop-dusting and Mount Rushmore sequences are already classics. Yes, it doesn't have the psychological complexity of Vertigo, the shock and horror of Psycho, but it is what it is: the most ENTERTAINING movie that Hitchcock ever made, and the one I can watch over and over again.