A Great Movie

Rating: 9/10 (11 December 2011)

North By Northwest is a 1959 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It stars Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason. It is widely considered a landmark in imagery and suspense, which had never before been done on such a scale as in this film.
The theme of the movie is mistaken identity. The movie is about an advertising executive named Roger Thornhill, played by Grant, who is kidnapped at a restaurant when he leaves his table to try to make a phone call. He has no idea why the men grab him, but he is thrown in a car and driven to a mansion owned by the Townsend family, the head of which works at the United Nations. A man who he assumes is Townsend (James Mason) interrogates him there, and accuses him to be a US spy named George Kaplan. This series of events catches an unwilling Thornhill up in the events of the Cold War. He tries to solve the mystery of who Kaplan really is, and later uncover the true identity of the man who had him kidnapped. Along the way he meets Eve Kendall, (Eva Marie Saint) who is also not what she seems.
The theme of the film really works well when one considers the time in which it was made. It was created during the fearful Cold War between the United States and Russia, where "Red Scare" suspicion ran rampant. The movie plays on these fears through its use of mistaken identity throughout. The villain is not who he says he is, and he thinks Thornhill, the protagonist, is someone else. This creates an environment of paranoia and distrust; where anyone can be an enemy threatening not only your life, but the way of life in the entire nation you live in. The motif of suspicion is the purveying feeling throughout. The suspense created in the movie was very real for people living in the United States at the time, which only bolstered the film's success.
Color is used in the movie in a surprisingly "normal" way. The movie takes place mostly in the daytime, with the outdoor scenes using the natural lighting from the sun, and the indoor scenes doing the same, often with large windows. The climactic scenes take place at night however, both in a mansion and on the face of Mount Rushmore. It's strange how once the revelations are made in the film, the climax takes place in darkness. This lack of light seems to play on the themes of mistaken identity by almost hiding the characters whose identities the audience has discovered. I really enjoyed this movie, and had not seen it prior to viewing it for HUMN 246. Even though I am a fan of old movies, I was surprised at how it kept my attention throughout, even though most of the film involves Grant's character running around and trying to figure out what's going on. I compare it to The Bourne Identity because it deals with mistaken identity and trying to figure out who all the players in the plot are.