Hilarious Thriller About Mistaken Identities

Rating: 10/10 (17 February 2010)

North By Northwest is my favorite movie by Alfred Hitchcock. He may have made better movies, artistically speaking, like Vertigo and Psycho. But for me neither surpasses the entertainment this movie provides.
This is a chase movie and follows Cary Grant as a New York businessman, Roger Thornhill, who's mistaken by spies as a secret agent and is forced to flee from them while trying to get in touch with someone who will help him clear the mess he got into. It's pretty much nonstop action filled with very tense situations and sequences. The movie is famous for the amazing airplane sequence, but there is more to the movie than that.
This is also a delightful romance movie, when Roger meets Eve (played by Eva maria Saint) aboard a train and she becomes an ally in his mission. Their relationship goes through many twists, but the chemistry between Grant and Marie Saint is perfect and the happy ending is one of the most deserved I've ever seen in a movie.
Ernest Lehman provides the screenplay, which is one of the best I've ever seen in a movie. Legend has it that Hitchcock merely gave Lehman a few key scenes and Lehman built the entire story out of them. What he achieved was a funny, lighthearted thriller full of humor and hilarious lines and bigger-than-life characters.
I've never seen Cary Grant this dashing and heroic and amusing before except in a very Hitchcockian movie called Charade. He was an amazing actor who brought lightness and invention to the screen with ease, and here he gives perhaps his best performance.
As far as thrillers go, North By Northwest remains one of the masterpieces of the genre, showing just what the genre can achieve when filmmakers are only willing to be original and inventive.