War is hell, even if it is a cold one.

Rating: 10/10 (30 May 2009)

Although it is one of his most famous it may not be considered among his best, which I think it deserves to be. North by Northwest is more than a cross-country trip across America to solve a case of mistaken identity, it is also a send-up of all the old detective and spy movies Hollywood made in the 1930s and 1940s. What Hitchcock has done here is take a similar premise from one of his earlier films, Saboteur, and create a funny, intelligent and wonderfully entertaining story filled with great visuals and one-liners.
Cary Grant gives perhaps his best role for Hitchcock in his last as Roger Thornhill, a man caught up in the web of espionage and deceit as he tries to convince a group of men that he is not George Kaplan. Eva Marie Saint is quite a saint as the beautiful and tough Eve Kendall. Perhaps the true reason to this great success is due to Ernest Lehman's fully entertaining script that has many tart one-liners as well as enough twists to screw up even M. Night Shyamalan. Of course, Hitchcock was at the top of his game here, working between his two greatest pictures, Vertigo and Psycho. Here, he is just having fun, playing with us as we try to follow all the action and suspense. Truly, this could be considered a prelude to all those other action movies made today. Some are good, most are pathetic, but Hitchcock pointed the way and it is a path worth going down again and again.