Sometimes the truth does taste like a mouthful of worms.
Roger O Thornhill is a harmless and amiable advertising executive who is absurdly mistaken for a government agent by a gang of ruthless spies. Forced to go out on the lam, Thornhill lurches from one perilous scenario to another. Can he survive to prove his innocence? Is the gorgeous blonde who is helping him really a friend? All will be revealed in Alfred Hitchcock's majestic thriller.
If deconstructing it you find that this isn't a perfect Hitchcock movie, for it under uses James Mason's coolly vile Phillip Vandamm (which is a crime), and it also doesn't have a female lead acting with any great urgency since Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall fails to fully fulfil the promise of Kendall's arrival in the movie. Yet this film rightly earns the right to be on any critics top 100 list, to be a favourite amongst the legion of Hitchcock fans (of which I'm one of that number), for it is escapist entertainment in its purest form, Hitchcock's most accessible popcorn entertainment piece.
From the moment at the film's opening when you hear Bernard Herrmann's wonderful music, it's enough to send goose pimples all over the body. For it is a musical portent that signifies we are about to get a fusion of thrills, mystery, and some cheeky Hitchcock humour, accompanied by heroes and villains all condensed purely for our enjoyment. Fronted by a diamond Cary Grant performance as the man wrongly mistaken for another that leads to him being pursued frighteningly across the states, the pic is never found wanting for genre high points. Coming as it did after the darkly brilliant and soul sapping Vertigo, Hitchcock clearly wanted to hang loose and enjoy himself.
Working from a fabulous script by Ernest Lehman, North By Northwest's very reason for being is purely to entertain those wanting to invest a frame of mind with it, with Hitchcock cunningly putting us on side with what is ultimately a shallow character in Grant's Roger O (the O doesn't stand for anything) Thornhill. It's a neat trick from the master of trickery and devilment. Some of the scenes on show are now almost folk lore such is the esteem in which they are held by movie fans and makers alike. A crop dusting aeroplane attack (the prelude to which has those goose pimples popping up in anticipation), a pursuit on Mount Rushmore and the often forgotten drunk car on a cliff sequence, these are all trade mark pieces of work from Hitchcock.
North By Northwest is in my humble opinion one of the true greats of cinema history, where as bleak and as unnervingly brilliant as Vertigo was the previous year, this is the polar opposite in structure and fable, but the result is most definitely equally as great. One of the reasons I fell in love with cinema in fact. 10/10
