North by Northwest Review

Ernest Lehman told Hitchcock he wanted to write the ultimate Hitchcock picture, and they built it outward from set pieces: a murder at the United Nations to start, a chase across Mount Rushmore to finish. Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill is an advertising man, a professional liar, abruptly mistaken for a spy he has never heard of, and Grant plays each new indignity as an affront to his tailoring.

The crop-duster sequence is the purest thing Hitchcock filmed: a man in a suit alone on an empty Indiana highway, no music, a plane dusting crops where there are no crops, then the attack. Empire named it the greatest movie moment of all time. Robert Burks shot in VistaVision, Saul Bass slid the opening credits across a glass office tower, and Bernard Herrmann's fandango keeps the whole thing sprinting. Eva Marie Saint is cool and knowing on the train to Chicago, and James Mason's Vandamm is the most civilized of villains.

It is not Hitchcock's deepest film. The plot holes are part of the game, Jessie Royce Landis's unimpressed mother is a running gag, and the last shot is a train-and-tunnel joke that somehow slipped past the censors. Penelope Houston called it the purest piece of entertainment filmmaking, and the phrase still fits.