North by Northwest

Rating: Null/10 (12 November 2012)

Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest strives to be thrilling, intriguing, comedic, and romantic—and it is; not a scene, not a moment in the film isn't played for a suspenseful or titillating thrill, a shocking twist, or a laugh—and, on most counts, it succeeds, guiltily as charged. Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive—a wise choice of occupation for a character who requires qualities that would make him initially mistakable for a government agent and the creativity and deceptiveness to eventually win the spy game, with and against real spies. Eva Marie Saint plays Eve Kendall, a woman who has entered the spy game after falling in love with a member of the wrong side and will labor to exit the game after she falls in love with a member of the right side: our good man Roger Thornhill. James Mason and Martin Landau play the smarmy bad guys who refuse to entertain the possibility that Thornhill could be anything other than a spy who currently goes by the name George Kaplan, even after a series of less-than-covert, bumbling moves. North by Northwest entertains more by ambition and suggestion than by complete delivery. There are cases when Bernard Herrmann's rousing, virtuosic score punctuates a moderately thrilling moment with supremely thrilling music, after the moment has nearly passed (e.g., the awkward collision and explosion that nearly ends the crop-duster scene), or suggests action that isn't as active as we would hope (e.g., the entire chase across the face of Mount Rushmore). Still, the film's ambition to constantly entertain, ravish, and intrigue is so monumentally big that its shortcomings are not enough to weigh it down from greatness. We willingly suspend our disbelief that sharp, intelligent enemy spies would attack our good man Roger Thornhill, unarmed and impeccably dressed, with crop-duster and gun, when it would seem that a gun alone would more than suffice—or that the CIA would go to such lengths to create a decoy to divert attention from a real agent, in an effort that would likely require the work of multiple on-site employees, many of whom would themselves risk being mistaken for Kaplan. We willingly suspend these disbeliefs because the story that Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman are telling us is so adventurous, smart, fun, and funny that we risk extreme enjoyment by not going all in.