Everyone works at top-form to create an enduring action masterpiece

Rating: Null/10 (13 September 2006)

Having been created during one of director Hitchcock's most fertile periods, this is, as screenwriter Lehman put it, "The Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures". The movie throws in virtually all of the legendary director's favorite types of cinematic trademarks from his own walk-on role, a man wrongly accused, an icy blonde who may be dangerous, action sequences taking place in unusual locales and a MacGuffin, to name only a few. Grant plays an ad executive who happens to attract the attention of two henchmen who mistake him for a government spy. They kidnap him and try to extract info from him. Once they realize they've chosen the wrong man, they try to kill him, but he slips away, only to come back the next day with heated accusations. Rather than let the matter rest, he starts to investigate the situation which quickly becomes deadly for him and for others. He sets out on a cross-country jaunt from New York City to Mount Rushmore with both the police and the villains nipping at his heels. Grant provides a typically charming and suave portrayal. He deftly pendulums from serious concern to humor to romance. Supplying the romance is Saint as a sexy, mysterious woman he meets on a train. She does an excellent job of portraying her character's inner turmoil as well as the light sarcasm that goes with her sophisticated persona (though it's more than a little ridiculous when she states her age as 26. She was nearly a decade past that.) The chief bad guy is Mason, in a laid-back and coolly above-it-all type of performance. He's menacing, but never breaks a sweat, preferring to let his sidekicks take care of the dirty work. His primary sidekick is Landau, who can be perceived as (and was intended to be displayed as) a homosexual, though the suggestion is fairly subtle. Landis, only several years older than Grant in real life, plays his mother in an amusing turn. Other notable cast members include the sturdy Carroll, who worked with Hitchcock in more films than anyone else, and Lang, who would later go on to rage at Tippi Hedren in "The Birds". Hutchison, best known for her role in "Harvey" plays a rather dubious mistress of the house where Grant is held and "General Hospital's" Beradino plays a cop who picks up Grant for drunk driving. The film gets off to a smashing start with the captivatingly cacophonous score by Bernard Herrman and, while long, rarely lets up in its trek from one scenario to the next. Nearly all of the set pieces are memorable, if not legendary, including the trip to the United Nations, the corn field conflagration and most importantly the chase up and down the faces of Mount Rushmore. Here Hitch indulges in another one of his favorite touches, having Saint lose piece after piece of her striking ensemble and becoming more and more disheveled. Incidentally, the director's favorite costume designer Edith Head was not part of this MGM production, leaving him without her wonderful tailoring and clean lines. He rejected the costumes offered up by the studio and purchased the bulk of Saint's wardrobe "off the rack" at Bergdorf-Goodman! Only one of the set pieces falls flat today and that is the drunken chase along a winding and perilous highway. Bad rear projection and some hammy close-ups from Grant render this one sequence less than perfect. However, that's quibbling when the rest of the film is so good. The ending (both the section involving the leads and the tag with the train) couldn't be more perfect.