North By Northwest 1959, Rated NR MGM Home Entertainment

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Starring Cary Grant, Eve Marie Saint, James Mason.

However, the enormous success of this film showed producers and studios that having a large budget wasn't necessarily a bad thing, and could in fact become a new marketing angle for feature films to come. North by Northwest was the culmination of Hitchcock's fascination with the idea of the innocent man on the run and the double chase. Cary Grant, at his most eloquent and dapper, stars as Roger O. Thornhill, a Madison Avenue advertiser, who is mistaken for George Kaplan, an undercover C.I.A. agent, hot on the trail of James Mason, a businessman in the field of selling United States government secrets to the highest foreign bidders. As the movie begins, Grant is detained by two of Mason's henchmen, to be questioned about what he knows of their illegal operations. Mason, perturbed that Grant maintains ignorance, tries to kill Grant. The attempt fails, and Grant, while seeking information about the peculiar situation he has become involved in, is framed for the murder of a United Nations delegate's. He boards a train to Chicago to find Kaplan with both Mason and the police in hot pursuit.

If Ernest Lehman's script sounds like it has a few tight twists, its because it does. North by Northwest isn't complex and hard to comprehend, like Brian DePalma's Mission Impossible, but constantly gives the viewers new bits of information which drastically changes the importance of past events in the context of the story. Ultimately, Grant and Eve Marie Saint, whom he met on the train to Chicago, end up atop Mount Rushmore in a beautifully shot series of scenes where the two scale down the face of George Washington to evade capture.

Aside from the crisp dialogue and nearly constant tongue-in-cheek humor that Lehman included in his script, one of the most pleasing aspects of North by Northwest is its nearly perfect rhythm and pace that Hitchcock created. Consciously choosing not to rush any action, or cut any important elements of the film to decrease its 136 minute running time, Hitchcock allowed scenes with Grant and Saint to play out, letting the camera and, consequently, the viewer to get a great sense of the chemistry between their two characters. When filmmakers start cutting scenes and dialogue in an effort to bring the final cut in under a certain length of time, it spells disaster. At this point in time, the director no longer has the best interests of the movie in mind; he/she is probably buoying to the interests of the studio.

Hitchcock is one of the only directors in Hollywood's history that had the final say in his productions, and in the case of North by Northwest, his decision not to bow under pressure is quite obvious. Combining point-of-view shots, with elaborate dolly and tracking shots, Hitchcock sets a wonderful tone to North by Northwest's story. It is because of incidentals like these, that Hitchcock included and demanded be left in the final cut, and superb acting performances by Grant, Saint, Mason, and Martin Landau, that North by Northwest is such a fantastic movie.

Hitchcock's unerring direction, Lehman's rock solid script, and Grant's finest performance in his distinguished career, put together spell greatness. North by Northwest is one of the five best films ever made.