It's in this movie where Alfred Hitchcock misses the bus

Rating: 8/10 (27 August 2006)

(Som Spoilers) Meeting with his fellow advertising executives at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel Roger Thronhill, Cary Grant, calls on one of the waiters at the Plaza's restaurant just as he announced a call for a Mr. George Kaplan. Thronhill is immediately mistaken from Kaplan and from that moment on until the end of the movie he's on the run for his life from spies police government agents and a gang of murderous thugs working for this import/exporter of government information the mysterious Phillip Vandamm, James Mason.
Kidnapped and taken to the Glen Cove estate of Lester Townsend, Phillip Oben, who's being impersonated by Vandamm Roger is worked over by Vandamm hoods who think that he's US secret agent George Kaplan. After forcibly loading him up until he's plastered with a fifth of bourbon they sit him in a car and turn the engine on. By what has to be a miracle Roger survives his ordeal ending up behind bars for drunken driving with a stolen car.
After being bailed out of jail by his mother Mrs. Clara Thornhill, Jessie Royce Landis,Roger goes to the Plaza looking for the mysterious George Kaplan to find out just what's going on in his almost getting killed by Vandamm's hoods for thinking that he's him! It turns that nobody ever saw Kaplan! Roger then finds a photo in the missing George Kaplan's in the hotel room of Vandamm who Roger thinks is Lester Towns. Roger goes to the UN where Towns is the representative of this UN agency called Unipol to confront him. It doesn't take long for Roger to realize that Towns isn't the person that he saw and talked to the other day at his Glen Cove estate! Before he can get anything out of him Towns is stuck from behind by a knife and Roger, whom the dying Towns fell on, is accused of murdering him when he unknowingly pulled the knife out of Towns' back making it look like he killed him.
Roger's unbelievable bad luck turned out to be a stroke of genius for the C.I.A as advertising executive Roger Thornhill has become secret agent George Kaplan who in reality doesn't even exist. Now Kaplan is a real flesh and blood human being to Vandamm and his gang. At the same time this throws off any suspicion of another secret agent that's in the inner circle of the Vandamm import/export spying operation the luscious blond Eva Kendell, Eva Marie Saint.
On the run with Eva Kendell helping him evade the police and the Vandamm mobsters Roger travels from New York City all the way North by Northwest going by rail to Chicago. It's later when Roger is set to meet with Eva's help the real George Kaplan he's suddenly attacked in an open field by a crop-duster plane. The plane ends up crashing into a gasoline truck, that Roger was almost run over by, in the pilots attempt in trying to run Roger down killing himself. By the time Roger got to Rapid City North Dakota he knew that he was being used by the C.I.A in the person of the professor, Leo G. Carroll. Roger also realized that his train friend and coach-mate Eva is really a C.I.A agent not the double-dealing femme fatal that he suspected her of being since the plane attack incident.
Making plans to check out of the country with the goods, a spool of US Government top-secret micro-film, Vandamm through his loyal butt-kissing sidekick Leonard, Martin Landau, finds out that Eva is really working for the US Government. That has Roger come to her rescue only to end up holding on to dear life, with Eva, on the slops of Mt. Rushmore.
Exciting final on Mt. Rushmore that, together with the dramatic and heart-stopping crop-duster plane chase scene, has since become Hollywood folk legend. Cary Grant is the perennially innocent bystander who gets in way over his head but somehow is able to overcome every obstacle, big or small, thrown at him. Ending up with the girl and the top secret micro-film slated for then Soviet Union. "North by Northwest" is a non-stop action-packed thriller that never lets up, even when there's no action going on, for a moment and to think that Roger Thronhill who was in the middle of all this excitement was divorced twice on the grounds that his two former wives stated that he was just too dull and boring of a man to live with!