Hitchcock's thrilling game of cat-and-mouse!

Rating: 10/10 (13 November 2005)

Exhilaration, anxiety, and tension all describe North by Northwest, Hitchcock's masterpiece about mistaken identity. Manhattan advertising executive Roger Thornhill is kidnapped by a gang of spies led by debonair Phillip Vandamm. Vandamm believes Thornhill is George Kaplan, a CIA agent supposedly working to stop him from exporting a valuable statue full of top-secret microfilm. After his first attempt at murdering Thornhill (or Kaplan) fails, Thorhnill is chased across the Midwest in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. What makes this movie so much fun to watch is the fact that it starts going from frame one and doesn't stop until the very end. The action unfolds seamlessly, no scene is wasted, and even has comedic touches. This is in partly due to Ernest Lehman's rich screenplay. He wrote other films full of great dialogue ( Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, Sweet Smell of Success) but in North by Northwest, he is at his peak. The dialogue between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint at the train dinner table, for example, is full of awesome sexual innuendo. The Master of Suspense uses his mastery of direction by creating yet another suspenseful story full of excitement and mystery. The luscious photography and tension-building musical score are attributed to the masterminds of Robert Burks and Bernard Herrmann, respectively. Be on the look out for many unforgettable scenes--the auction scene, the crop duster scene, the Mt. Rushmore sequence and many more in between. Highly Recommended!