Tagline: A 2000 Mile chase… That blazes a trail of TERROR to a gripping, spine-chilling climax!
North By Northwest movie storyline. Madison Avenue advertising man Roger Thornhill finds himself thrust into the world of spies when he is mistaken for a man by the name of George Kaplan. Foreign spy Philip Vandamm and his henchman Leonard try to eliminate him but when Thornhill tries to make sense of the case, he is framed for murder.
Now on the run from the police, he manages to board the 20th Century Limited bound for Chicago where he meets a beautiful blond, Eve Kendall, who helps him to evade the authorities. His world is turned upside down yet again when he learns that Eve isn’t the innocent bystander he thought she was. Not all is as it seems however, leading to a dramatic rescue and escape at the top of Mt. Rushmore.
North by Northwest (1959) is a suspenseful, classic Alfred Hitchcock caper thriller. The box-office hit film is one of the most entertaining movies ever made and one of Hitchcock’s most famous suspense/mystery stories in his entire career. One of the film’s posters advertised: “Only Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock ever gave you so much suspense in so many directions.”
The film paired debonair Cary Grant with director Hitchcock for the fourth and last time: their earlier collaborations were in Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), and To Catch a Thief (1955). And Hitchcock also chose Oscar-winning Eva Marie Saint as the blonde heroine (to the studio’s and Grant’s surprise) – one of many such female characters in his film repertoire.
The film’s themes include many plot devices and elements typical of Hitchcock films (especially The 39 Steps (1935) and Saboteur (1942)) – predominantly the themes of mistaken identity for the innocent, ordinary, ‘Wrong Man’ hero. Another of its themes is false pretenses and survival in 20th Century America during the Cold War. [The Leo G. Carroll character in the film – the head of the American Intelligence Agency, was possibly modeled after two 1950s real-life figures: Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen W. Dulles, head of the CIA.] Arthur Hiller’s Hitchcockian Silver Streak (1976) paid homage to this film, with a similar train ride, dangerous circumstances, pursuit by police, and a mysterious woman.
At Hitchcock’s insistence, the film was made in Paramount’s VistaVision widescreen process, making it one of only two VistaVision films made at MGM; the other was High Society. The scene of Cary Grant going to the United Nations in New York was filmed illicitly because UN authorities—after reviewing the script—denied filming on or near its property. After two failed attempts to get the required shots, Hitchcock had Grant pull up in taxicab right outside the general assembly building while a hidden camera crew filmed him exiting the vehicle and walking across the plaza.
The car chase scene in which Thornhill is drunkenly careening along the edge of cliffs of Long Island, high above the ocean, was actually shot on the California coast, and in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, according to DVD audio commentary. The crop-duster sequence, meant to take place in northern Indiana, was shot on location on Garces Highway near the towns of Wasco and Delano, north of Bakersfield in Kern County, California (35°45′39″N 119°33′41″W). Years later, in a show at the Pompidou Centre called “Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences”, an aerial shot of Grant in the cornfield, with a “road cutting straight through the cornrows to the edge of the screen”, was said to draw on Léon Spilliaert’s “Le Paquebot ou L’Estran”, which features “alternating strips of sand and ocean blue bands stretch[ed] to the edge of the canvas.”
The aircraft seen flying in the scene is a Naval Aircraft Factory N3N Canary, a World War II Navy pilot trainer sometimes converted for crop-dusting. The aircraft that hits the truck and explodes is a wartime Stearman (Boeing Model 75) trainer. Like its N3N lookalike, many were used for agricultural purposes through the 1970s. The plane was piloted by Bob Coe, a local crop-duster from Wasco. Hitchcock placed replicas of square Indiana highway signs in the scene. In an extensive list of “1001 Greatest Movie Moments” of all time, the British film magazine Empire in its August 2009 issue ranked the crop-duster scene as the best.
North By Northwest (1959)
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis, Leo G. Carroll, Josephine Hutchinson, Philip Ober, Martin Landau, Adam Williams, Edward Platt, Robert Ellenstein
Screenplay by: Ernest Lehman
Production Design by: Robert F. Boyle
Cinematography by: Robert Burks
Film Editing by: George Tomasini
Set Decoration by: Henry Grace, Frank R. McKelvy
Art Direction by: William A. Horning, Merrill Pye
Music by: Bernard Herrmann
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release Date: July 28, 1959
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