I rank it as Hitchcock's 19th best, myself

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 2000)

Let's get one thing straight: this film is tremendous fun. Don't lose sight of this fact because of anything I say. It's fun ALL THE WAY THROUGH, even when it creaks. Moreover I can see some of the things that lead people to the ridiculous conclusion that it's a masterpiece. Several scenes are classics in miniature - I can't really say which ones, but I suppose you already know about the crop duster sequence - then there's the priceless line Cary Grant delivers as he runs to the aeroplane on the slopes of Mt. Rushmore, so carefully led up to - and Bernard Herrmann's score is brilliant.
And yet ...
That damned Eve Kendall: SHE'S the McGuffin, not the "government secrets" the baddies are trying to smuggle out of the country. (Clearly the film wants us to think she's so much more important than they are; but if it refuses to tell us what the villains want and why, how are we in any position to make a comparison? Hitchcock's McGuffin theory led him astray here, I fear.) The heroine of "North by Northwest" can't hold a candle to her vibrant counterpart in the original cross-country Hitchcock, "The 39 Steps" (1935). Watch the original to see what's missing from the remake. The later film has a tendency, just a tendency, to fall asleep on its feet: it needed more poetry in its quest, more humanity in its hero, more vigour in its man hunt, less tedium in its exposition. If I didn't know better - if I hadn't seen "Vertigo", released the previous year, or "Psycho", from the subsequent one - I'd say Hitch had ossified.