Stars: Cary Grant, James Mason, Eva Marie Saint, Leo G. Carroll, Martin Landau, Josephine Hutchinson, Jessie Royce Landis, Philip Ober

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Summary: Hitchcock's first thriller for MGM in which a businessman is mistaken for a spy. He is pursued by enemy agents because he knows too much. Includes the original theatrical trailer.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST is a suspense thriller that finds Cary Grant in the role of Roger Thornhill, a Manhattan advertising executive mistaken for a spy. Considered by many to be the prototypical pure action movie (creating the template for later James Bond and Indiana Jones films), the film is a cross-country roller-coaster ride with Alfred Hitchcock at the helm. The film is duly famous for several classic and indelible scenes, including the desert biplane encounter and the Mt. Rushmore climax. The original title was THE MAN IN LINCOLN'S NOSE, which was replaced by a reference to a line from William Shakespeare's HAMLET (in which Hamlet says, "I am but mad north-north-west."). The magical combination of Hitchcock and the debonair Grant--who made four wonderful films together--makes NORTH BY NORTHWEST a suspense-filled standout.
When Thornhill finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, the world as he knows it comes to an end. Suddenly danger threatens as the hapless businessman is targeted as an American intelligence agent and set up as a killer. All of Thornhill's attempts to straighten things out only make matters worse--and soon the desperate man is on the run from murderous foreign operatives, the CIA, and the police. The supporting cast, including Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Martin Landau, is uniformly excellent.

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A strong candidate for possibly the most entertaining and enjoyable film ever made by a Hollywood studio, North by Northwestis positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo(1958) and the stark horror of Psycho(1960). In the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock films it shows the director at his most effervescent in a romantic comedy-thriller that also features one of the definitive Cary Grant performances. Which is not to say that this is just "Hitchcock Lite". It's a classic Hitchcock Wrong Man scenario: Grant is Roger O Thornhill (initials ROT), an advertising executive who is mistaken by enemy spies for a US undercover agent named George Kaplan. Convinced these sinister fellows (James Mason as the boss and Martin Landau as his henchman) are trying to kill him, Roger flees and meets a sexy Stranger on a Train (Eva Marie Saint), with whom he engages in one of the longest, most convolutedly choreographed kisses in screen history. And of course there are the famous set pieces: the stabbing at the United Nations, the crop-duster plane attack in the cornfield (where a pedestrian has no place to hide) and the cliffhanger finale atop the stone faces of Mount Rushmore. With its sparkling Ernest Lehman script and that pulse-quickening Bernard Herrmann score, what more could a filmgoer possibly desire? --Jim Emerson, Amazon.com

On the DVD: This wide-screen print of the movie looks remarkably fresh, preserving the vivid depth of the original's VistaVision cinematography. The main extra feature is a new and entertaining 40-minute documentary hosted by Eva Marie Saint in which most of the surviving cast and crew give their insights into the making of the picture (we learn for example that canny Cary Grant charged 15 cents per autograph). Screenwriter Ernest Lehman provides an audio commentary and on a separate audio-only track Bernard Herrmann's masterful score can be heard in its entirety. There's also a stills gallery and trailers. --Mark Walker

Main Language:	English
Year:	1959
Release Date:	June 19, 2009
Runtime:	136 minutes
Certification:
Keywords:	English, General, North, Northwest, Thriller
Genre:	Thriller