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Motion Picture Daily (30/Jun/1959) - North by Northwest

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North by Northwest

As unmistakably Hitchcock as the famed pencil profile, this sparkling production is crammed to the edges of the Vista Vision widescreen with the trademarks of the Old Master. It is as though he had decided to use every trick of shock, suspense, excitement, terror which gains impact from its use in familiar surroundings, and continually violent action, in one explosive work. It must have been fun to do it and it is certainly fun to watch it.

With the potent names of Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason backing up the Hitchcock reputation, widely established now through his television series, and the word of mouth which is sure to follow its initial engagements, the picture is certain of success.

Like so many of the master's works, it is a spy story, designed to show the Hitchcock versatility in selecting new environments for his action and high jinks. Never one to let plausibility get in the way of a rattling good story, Hitchcock has Grant, playing a high pressure Madison Avenue advertising executive, get involved almost at the picture's opening with a spy ring who mistake him for a counterspy.

From there the chase starts, with Grant ducking the murderous attempts by the spies on his life and ducking the police who want him on a framed murder charge, being protected most cozily by Miss Saint overnight in a compartment on the 20th Century Limited to Chicago and then reluctantly sent by her to near death by gunfire from a low-flying plane, and, with the plot volleying back and forth faster than the eye can follow, winding up with a cliff-hanging sequence down the mighty stone faces of the Mt. Rushmore Memorial.

Most of the threads are picked up and followed through at the end and those that aren't are forgotten in the excitement, anyway. In any event audiences won't analyze it, they'll be entertained, absorbed, intrigued and exhausted by it.

Nor was Hitchcock the only one to have fun making it. Each of the cast enters his role with zest. Grant and Miss Saint are first-rate as the outraged victim and the venturesome girl who risks her life as a counterspy; Mason is suavely sinister as the spy leader, and the supporting cast, including Leo G. Carroll, Jessie Royce Landis, Philip Ober, Martin Landau and Adam Williams, is properly villainous or calmly commonplace as their roles require.

The VistaVision camera and Technicolor are used by producer-director Hitchcock to extraordinary advantage in the chase sequences, in crowded Grand Central, on the flat and dusty brown plains of the midwest, and by moonlight on the historic faces carved in the living rock of Mt. Rushmore. These sequences individually are classics of cinema art.

Some of the dialogue in the sequences during which Miss Saint protects Grant from the police by enticing him into her compartment on the train is startlingly frank, and near the end of the picture there is an open and unnecessary reference to homosexuality. Both would limit the picture to mature audiences.

Running time, 137 minutes. Adult classification. Release in July.

 — James D. Ivers

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