A Hitchcock classic, but not among his best

Rating: 7/10 (25 August 2004)

`North by Northwest', written by Ernest Lehman and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, stars Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive who finds himself embroiled in a particularly nasty case of mistaken identity. He finds himself being mistaken for a gentleman who is wrapped up in some dirty dealings with Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), his henchman Leonard (Martin Landau) and various other unsavory thugs under Vandamm's employ. He also meets up with Hitchcock's requisite blonde femme fatale, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) and surrounded by this cast of characters makes a cross-country adventure where his life is threatened several times; all the while with Thornhill having to depend on his wits to keep him alive.

While `North by Northwest' is a good film, I don't consider it to be one of his best, which, at least in my small circle of rabid film friends/relatives, is fairly sacrilegious. I enjoy the vibrancy of the script and the lush cinematography, but there are a couple of things that cause the film to fall short of excellence on my personal Hitchcock scale. Mainly, there's the matter of James Mason as the villain. Mason is a great actor, and has been in some really good films, so his talents were wasted as the tepid Vandamm. There simply really wasn't a part for him in the film; rather, most of the relatively `juicy' bits were relegated to Martin Landau. It seemed that the concentration was solely on Grant's character, which in most cases is adequate, but in a suspense film, I personally like to see the villain have a more pervasive presence.
Of course, there are some masterful elements to this film. The infamous cornfield scene is truly masterful. It isn't even the shot of the crop duster chasing down Grant  the image that gets me every time is the very quick shot of Grant standing across the dusty road from the gentleman waiting for the bus. As he is sizing him up, trying to figure out if he is the man that he has traveled a long distance to see, Hitchcock frames the shot much like a classic western. There are many shots like this that, if frozen, would make a compelling photograph. I can also acknowledge, while I am not as much a fan of Hitchcock's comedic moments as I am of the more dark or horrifying ones, that the comic timing with which Grant delivers his lines is excellent. His charisma certainly adds a spark to the film, and there are times when he is so smooth that even if something was completely unbelievable I had to laugh and say, `Hey, it's Cary Grant  what do you expect?'
`North by Northwest' was made in 1959 and is more akin to the whimsical and much-eschewed `The Trouble with Harry' than his more story-driven films of the 1940's and his horrifying masterpiece a year later, 1960's, `Psycho'. While I acknowledge that `North by Northwest' is a good film, it doesn't even make my personal `Hitchcock Top Ten' on which his darker films dwell. However, it's kind of the way I feel about the Coen Brothers  even a simply `good' film of theirs is usually much better than the average film, so a slightly above-average Hitchcock film like `North by Northwest' garners at least three stars from me.
--Shelly