Frenetic chase pictures are a dime a dozen but only one holds any true merit to go that extra mile, unafraid of going ballistic in terms of absurdity and breathless moments that will leave you awestruck. Alfred Hitchcock's "North By Northwest" is not just a perfect chase picture, it is the perfect chase picture. It is chock full of action galore and suspenseful situations that continually build into elegant, inventive moments of spectacle and more intimate moments in intimate surroundings as well (the hilarious auction sequence; the Franklin Lloyd Wright house sequence). Only Hitchcock can build suspense at a cafeteria that faces Mount Rushmore! Only Hitchcock can astound with a crop-duster plane dusting fields where there are no crops while trying to kill our reluctant hero.
The coup de resistance is the perfect, charismatic leading man, Cary Grant, playing the most indelible unlikely hero with a name that, admittedly, may not be the most memorable yet you get used to it. That name is Roger O. Thornhill, a successful advertising executive who has been married once too often and still communicates with his mother. Grant doesn't play Roger as some unlikable lout - he is simply a suave, educated man who doesn't think for a second about stealing a cab ride (neither do the villains). He has charm, elegance and sophistication and is not boring - the way Grant walks gracefully across a room in this movie has always inspired me. When Roger is kidnapped and mistaken for a secret agent who doesn't exist, we feel for him and hope he can get out of this haywire situation. The beauty of a mystifyingly uniformed screenplay by Ernest Lehman is that you always wonder how Roger will get out of any perilous situation he is in, no matter how hair-raising. Whether he is forced to imbibe copious amounts of bourbon, not paying a ticket and escaping into the former 20th Century Limited train after an assassination hit at the UN (!), climbing down the Mount Rushmore in cliffhanging moments that would make any formidable hero sweat, bidding ridiculous amounts of money at an auction on a statue holding microfilm with government secrets, and so much more that it would be criminal to reveal all. The whole movie is about a spy who isn't one yet he becomes rather good at it. We are never one step ahead of Roger - when he discovers a new angle or a twist about someone, we are in lockstep with whatever new surprising information develops.
From the most delicious nefarious villain of 1950's cinema that I can think of, the devious Vandamm played by James Mason, to one of the most mature and intelligent blonde female leads of almost any Hitchcock film, Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall, a mysterious woman on the train who has more than a few secrets up her sleeve, "North By Northwest" has much up its own sleeve. Saint's romantic scenes with Grant set the fireworks ablaze, more so than in "To Catch a Thief" and possibly "Notorious." A sumptuous, exciting, goose-pimpling music score by Bernard Herrmann adds enormously to the proceedings. "North By Northwest" is about as entertaining as most Hollywood movies ever get.
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