A Cinema Buff's Delight

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 1999)

Cary Grant, kidnapped in the opening frames of the film due to a case of mistaken identity, is actually a red-herring in a cold war spying game.The game goes awfully wrong, and to set the matters right in comes the sultry blonde Eva Marie-Saint,an avatar of Mata Hari.After some cat and mouse games in a train , a crop-duster tries to mow down Grant in a widely acclaimed and much written about sequence. But to my mind the auction sequence,in which our hero makes a perfect ass of himself inorder to get arrested and shake off his pursuers, takes the cake.It is top class hilarious stuff. This counterpoint between suspense and comedy is in fact the tenor of the film. The tempo of suspense is heightened and maintained with the help of appropriate music and through shadows and sinister camera angles. The finale on Mount Rushmore is both literally and figuratively a cliff-hanger. Grant is poker faced and takes his series of misadventures stoically - a la 007. Eva Marie, though icily menacing on the outside , shows a vulnerability deep down which is alluring. As Grant aptly describes her "she is a big girl, and in all the right places too ". The film is replete with such enjoyable one-liners. Cinema buffs would also love the editing wizardry - look out for the cut from Mount Rushmore to the upper berth in the train at the very end of the film. While not definitely the greatest of Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre , is is nevertheless a cinema buff's delight. Rating - 8/10