Best in Show.

Rating: 9/10 (1 May 2009)

A lot of directors have taken a crack at the comedy-laced thriller, among them, most notably, Alfred Hitchcock, but probably none have topped this for sheer entertainment value.
Cary Grant is a stereotypical Madison Avenue advertising man in the 1950s, shallow and given to "expedient exaggerations." He's urban, well groomed, and tan as only Cary Grant can be tan. By accident, he is misidentified as George Kaplan, a non-existent government agent. He's kidnapped by foreign operatives who try to kill him. When he manages to escape he's framed for a murder. With the police after him, he boards a train for Chicago in pursuit of the real "Kaplan", who of course is nothing more than a CIA-inspired fiction who occupies prop hotel rooms, wears prop clothes, and has prop dandruff. On the train he bumps into the savagely seductive Eva Marie Saint. This at least is no accident. She's a double agent, working for the suave spy, James Mason, and secretly for the CIA's Leo G. Carroll. The double pursuit -- the cops after Grant, Grant after "Kaplan" -- becomes twisted and winds up on the faces of the four presidents at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
At the exciting climax, Cary Grant has shed some of his callousness and has committed his love and his life to Eva Marie Saint. His monogrammed matchbooks, "R.O.T.", standing for Roger Thornhill and also for "rot" are no longer relevant.
There are some splendid examples of black and white feature films. Who could improve on Gregg Toland's photography in "Citizen Kane" or the striking and sinuous contrasts in "The Maltese Falcon" or the bleak gaiety captured in "La Dolce Vita"? But this one cries out for a big screen, color, and surround sound to accommodate composer Bernard Hermann's musical score, that opens and closes with a wild fandango.
Okay. Visualize one of the sequences here, probably the best known. Kaplan has supposedly agreed to meet Grant at "Prairie Stop, Indiana." It's nothing more than a spot in the middle of a two-dimensionally flat wasteland -- no trees, no buildings, no hills, nothing but vast, tawny plowed plots and a parched cornfield nearby, all shimmering in the heat. Grant waits silently as the occasional car whizzes past. Nothing is happening. Then a man is dropped off across the highway. The two strangers are alone, staring at each other across the pavement. Minutes go by as they do nothing but stare, Grant puzzled ("Is this Kaplan?"), the other inexpressive. The other guy turns out to be a know-nothing local and after he departs on a bus, Grant is attacked by an airplane and barely escapes with his life. For the many people who have seen this sequence, let me ask them to imagine this shot in the traditional small screen ratio and done in black and white. It would lose half its impact.
Some critics have, I think, over-interpreted the movie. I doubt that the title is taken from from Hamlet: "I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw." There's Grant's ambiguous relationship with his mother (a favorite Hitchcock theme in serious contexts), the wary love story, the development of Grant's character. But in this instance those features are trivialized. It's really a complicated, sublimely executed chase thriller at heart.
Ernest Lehman's script includes many amusing incidents and some of them are very funny indeed. Not just snappy dialog -- "Something wrong with your eyes, Mister?" "Yes, they're sensitive to questions." But whole scenes that are laugh-out-loud comic -- Grant making a fool of himself at a public auction in order to attract the attention of the police. (The scene was prefigured in the much earlier "All Through the Night" and later imitated in "The Prize.") The love affair between Grant and Saint begins with a dutiful seduction and ends with marriage -- too quickly, too jury-rigged, too required by the plot -- and some of the dialog between them is clumsy, but who cares? It's not art, but so little on the screen is. It's about as good an entertainment as you're likely to find, better than any of the chase thrillers coming out today. If I see another car chase that ends in an exploding fireball I'll write an angry OpEd piece for the New York Times.