A rollicking, mind bending thriller!

Rating: 10/10 (17 May 2015)

Cary Grant is Roger Thornhill, an ad exec that gets kidnapped and then...mayhem ensues. Was he kidnapped? Was he drunk? Whom did he allegedly assassinate? What the blue blazes is going on anyway? Everything develops so swiftly in North by Northwest that you'll want to pay attention to everything, from facial expressions to rooms to the various actors and settings as if you stray for a moment, you may well lose touch as the lovely Eva Marie Saint nearly does at the end.
Right, back to Roger. He gets in a car, goes to a meeting, excuses himself to make a phone call and is abducted and taken to an estate, where he's accused of being someone else. He protests (vainly) and is then forced to drink down until drunkenness and nearly run off a cliff before taking the wheel itself; at this point one starts wondering if Grant would have done a passable 007, but I digress...
Thornhill spends the rest of the movie on the lam, running from the police after being mistaken for an assassin at the United Nations and mistaken for an CIA decoy as well. It all comes to a head when he meets the lovely (and treacherous)Eva Marie Saint as Eve, who is also more than she appears. We find out the whole thing circles around the slippery van Demme and...a finale at Mount Rushmore that will leave you holding your breath and hoping the best for our protagonists while secretly wishing for the worst, just to see if Hitchcock would go there.
North by Northwest languished in the pile of classics we go through on Fridays until we had a yearning for a Cary Grant flick. This is much more though; it is a movie that makes your brain come alive, leads you to self-doubt while having the adrenaline pump through you, especially in the fields of Dakota. Simply a brilliant film, even when Thornhill starts catching on about halfway through the movie. Watch for Alfred Hitchcock's inevitable cameo at the start of the movie. This time you can't miss him and nor should you miss this movie.