"War Is Hell, Even When It's A Cold One."

Rating: 10/10 (1 September 2006)

Following up on his two previous masterpieces, The Thirty Nine Steps and Saboteur; Alfred Hitchcock put together his ultimate chase film with elements of both coming into Ernest Lehman's screenplay. I've seen figures that show in terms of box office and later video sales and rentals, North By Northwest was Hitchcock's most successful film financially.
At this point Alfred Hitchcock's name over the title could sell a movie, but I'm sure he didn't mind having Cary Grant in it to draw the movie going public. This was Cary's fourth and final appearance in a Hitchcock film and I think it is his best performance in one.
Like in the two films I cited, Cary is innocently caught up in a web of intrigue and he got there by just answering a telephone page at a hotel dining room. He took a call right after someone paged a George Kaplan and the bad guys think he's Kaplan. And he gets grabbed.
It's a devilishly difficult situation for him because there ain't no George Kaplan. He's a fictitious guy who was invented by one of our spy agencies (that's never identified in the story)to take the heat off an agent very close to masterspy James Mason. Mason tries to murder Grant by getting him drunk and putting him behind the wheel of a car. Later on Grant gets framed for murder while trying to find out what's going on and he's on the run from New York to Chicago to Rapid City and the Mount Rushmore monument.
James Mason plays the cultured villain Philip Van Dam. Mr. Mason who had some of the most precise diction heard this side of Ronald Colman on screen, could play villain and hero and a lot in between equally well. Among other things he's a bi-sexual and his henchman/boyfriend Martin Landau is jealous of his involvement with Eva Marie Saint. With the Code still firmly in place, it was quite daring for Mason to refer to Landau's suspicions as his 'woman's intuition.
Eva Marie Saint joins the list of cool and fiery blonds Hitchcock was so partial to for his films. I'm surprised he never used Eva Marie again, she seemed the perfect successor for Grace Kelly who if she hadn't become a princess would have been playing this part for sure.
Bernard Herrman who wrote the acclaimed score for Hitchcock's Vertigo followed that up with an equally good score. Especially during the moments of Grant's tangle with a crop duster plane and the chase across the Mount Rushmore Monument, Herrman made great use of music to help the audience feel the tension. It's a great instrumental piece, violins that seem to pound with a drum counterpoint. The best kind of film music.
And why wouldn't it be because North By Northwest is some of the best kind of film making.