One of Hitchcok's best movies

Rating: 10/10 (14 March 2006)

This is probably the best loved of all Hitchcock's films and it is also one of his finest. It is a particularly daft comedy-thriller in that the plot hinges on a series of improbable events and it is hugely entertaining, full of classic set pieces. Cary Grant is the suave, debonair hero who finds himself clinging to a man with a knife in his back in the lobby of the United Nations Building. When he goes on the run, determined to find out who framed him, it isn't just the authorities who are after him but the villains as well. When he meets a leggy blonde on a train, (what is it with Hitchcock and trains?), she is not all that she seems. Eva Marie Saint plays her with an easy-going sexiness that makes her character very likable. And Grant has so much charm he gets away with playing Jessie Royce Landis' son when, in reality, she was only eight years his senior.
The villains are James Mason and Martin Landau but they aren't given enough to do and as villains they don't feel threatening. What is threatening is the crop-dusting plane that appears out of an empty blue sky to chase Grant around some vast open spaces. And later, when Grant and Saint are chased over the faces on Mount Rushmore, it's our familiarity with the locations that heightens the tension. In the end the McGuffin, as Hitchcock called the device that held the plot in place, hardly matters. His genius is that he makes you care about the inconsequential things. This is a great comedy-thriller.