Thriller that interests me more than it thrills me

Rating: Null/10 (21 November 2010)

Out of all the different types of movie, the one I'm continuously mystified as to which angle to hold it from and examine it, is the brainless action film, the one that shuns using our brains to think about it for not having used any in the making. And out of all the different types of movie that want to entertain an audience, this one entertains me the least, the James Bond type of spy adventure that stages spectacle in an elaborate ever-increasing scale, that takes us on a tour through exotic locales to introduce us to exotic characters, where at some point we find ourselves on the top of a Monte Carlo casino or the French Riviera or Mt. Rushmore. This one seems like a prototype of sorts. To the extent that it wants me to be excited by climaxes where people hang from cliffs or find themselves chased by planes, I'm left cold. As usual for Hitchcock, the movie must stop dead in its tracks for two people to fall in love. In Notorious at least the double-entendre played by the two love partners is intriguing because they're saying idle things in place of meaning important questions, am I being loved, am I appreciated as a person, here they're saying things around actually saying "I want to hump you on the carpet".
What excites me in North by Northwest is synchronicity, things happening by an act of fateful chance or as an agent for it. The fates conspiring to play a game in the chance raising of a hand in a restaurant, entire worlds changed from one moment to the next. Like a film noir hero, indeed one who is later seduced into the web of a wily femme fatale, the hapless puppet dangling on strings pulled by an unseen puppeteer, doing this with a smile like the dangling and the pulling too is part of the chance game that is meaningful for only as long as it lasts. I like how Cary Grant is at once bemused and irate that he can't prove he's not George Kaplan. At the same time it seems absurd that he can't. I like the atmosphere in the hotel room scene, characters walking in on Grant and identifying him as Kaplan although none of them has seen him. Kaplan is at once a persona non grata and a tabula rasa. There's no built-in mental content in the idea of George Kaplan; once Grant becomes identifed the name, through external experience and perception associated with the name, he is the name.
But then, this is a film that doesn't quite have the time to focus on that. It needs to get moving. I like how the cropduster scene begins, Grant getting off a bus in the middle of an anonymous flat wilderness, fenceposts jutting out from sodden earth. How he eyes warily someone he thinks is George Kaplan on the other side of the road, like a western shootout is about to erupt except the two of them are wearing dusty suits. I don't like how the cropduster goes on, and I don't like the Mt Rushmore conclusion. Or any of the minor scenes where Grant is not acting a part.