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(35mm)

North by Northwest is famous because of one scene. Now, that doesn't mean the rest of it is lacking, as it should be common knowledge of its solidified place in the canon of the greatest American films in the history of the cinema, but the zenith is found in a classic Hitchcock concept: the image of the pursuer and the pursued. Its famous sequence of a crop-duster aircraft leaping towards Cary Grant's Roger O. Thornhill in the Midwest countryside - bullets flying near his dives for survival - is constructed through the context of a world unknown: a place not designed for your color or creed or gender or social status. It is an environment, depicted via the…

“Games? Must we?”

It’s fitting that North By Northwest truly gets going when a Madison Avenue Ad exec, played by consummate leading man Cary Grant, finds himself at the wheel of a stolen car and headed for a cliff after having been force-fed a bottle of bourbon by mysterious henchman who’ve mistaken him for someone else. This is, after all, the film one could argue to be Alfred Hitchcock’s least restrained, even if the filmmaker himself was never anything but, much to his eventual remorse. 

Though often commercially successful, Alfred Hitchcock was generally dismissed in his day by many critics and the academy as a purveyor of pure style (it took the French to declare him a genius before Hollywood…

Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest features a captivating first half, making terrific use of wit, tension & elements of suspense but the film as a whole is unfortunately marred by a lacklustre second half which bogs the story down with a drawn out narrative that makes its runtime felt in the end although it does have one spectacular sequence that will be etched in memory once it's seen.

One of the first films to lay down the foundations for modern action thrillers in Hollywood, North by Northwest is a thrilling tale of mistaken identity which concerns an innocent advertising executive who is mistaken for a government agent by an organisation of foreign spies and is pursued by them. The story covers…

Horizontal meets vertical as the title and crisscrossing credits propose. Cary Grant commits the greatest of horizontal acts (swiping into a cab) and tells the man a lie he's a hero for his immobility. The rest of the film turns a cosmic joke on the star as he runs from East to West in the identity of a man of a shorter suit. The camera arcs in a circular dance as he faces James Mason, the short stature man pulling his weight through lean Martin Laundau, who pours a tall bottle into Grant. "It's so horribly sad...why is it I feel like laughing?" an agent exclaims after a top down shot against the UN makes Grant a small dot in…