North by Northwest (Blu-ray)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

It's been fifty years, and in celebration of the event, Warner Bros. present "North by Northwest" in a restored and remastered 50th Anniversary, high-definition Blu-ray Book Edition. Things couldn't be better.

With this movie, we find director Alfred Hitchcock at his most playful and Cary Grant at his most debonair. It's a potent combination for one of the screen's choicest comedy thrillers, "North By Northwest."

Actually, I suppose one might best describe "North by Northwest" as a romantic adventure comedy thriller. It is quintessential Hitchcock, containing every ingredient the old master had perfected up to that point, 1959. The two films that came directly after would follow different paths, "Psycho" in 1960 and "The Birds" in 1963 adding outright shock and a little fantasy to the mystery. But "North by Northwest" stays clear of too many scary episodes, and when things do get tense for a few minutes they are sure to lighten up before long.

What we have here is the innocent bystander caught up in extraordinary events, believed by no one and pursued by everyone. If that sounds like "The 39 Steps" or "The Wrong Man" or "The Man Who Knew Too Much," you'll already have the idea of Grant's predicament. He plays a Madison Avenue advertising executive, Roger Thornhill, whom a gang of international spies mistake for a secret agent named George Kaplan. They kidnap Thornhill and attempt to make him talk; they never mention what they want him to talk about, nor should they. It is, in fact, what Hitchcock called a McGuffin, a plot gimmick that moves the story along but, otherwise, has no real purpose. Therefore, we don't need to know what the bad guys want from Kaplan, only that they're after him and they think Thornhill is their man.

Anyway, Thornhill gets away from them and in the process manages to appear as though he's killed a man, right in the middle of the U.N. Building in full view of witnesses and a photographer! Now, he figures the only way to prove his innocence is to find the real murderers, which leads to a cross-country romp, a romance, and at least two of the most celebrated chase sequences ever filmed.

Don't even begin to figure out the reason behind it all. In Ernest Lehman's blithely illogical plot, the spies are after Thornhill, the police are after him, his picture is in all the newspapers, so he hides out on a train, where he meets a young woman named Eve Kendall, played by Eva Marie Saint. Ms. Saint is in the mold of many Hitchcock heroines--Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren--blond, beautiful, seemingly harmless, but harboring more secrets than she lets on.

James Mason plays the chief scoundrel, Phillip Vandamm, with roguish charm. I mean, men with British accents make for such wonderful heavies, don't they? One can't help thinking of Basil Rathbone, Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons, and the rest. Maybe it's the something about the pompous precision of the scoundrels' enunciation that makes us long to see them get their comeuppance. In any event, Mason makes a strong, menacing, gentleman villain, ordering about several henchmen, including Martin Landau as the sinister and enigmatic Leonard. Leo J. Carroll, a reliable staple of Hitchcock films, plays the Professor, a CIA operative we're never too sure about until the very end.

Indeed, nothing in Lehman's script is quite what it appears to be. For instance, Grant is almost too handsome, too fit, too elegant, too suave, too refined for anyone to trust. Remember, as an ad man, his business is duplicity; he lies for a living. Then, too, his middle initial is O, as in zero, because it stands for nothing except to give him the acronym ROT. Nothing but rot? Curious, no? As a piece of further mischief, Jessie Royce Landis plays his mother in the film, yet she was in reality only seven or eight years older than Grant. Well, it does tend to make Grant seem younger than his actual mid-fiftyish age and helps us to accept his romance easier with the much-younger Eva Marie Saint.

Finally, you may wonder, where is Hitchcock's famous cameo in all of this? Audiences would sometimes spend as much energy looking for Hitch's appearance as they did following the plot. As in most of his later films, the director gets it over with early on, playing a fellow trying to catch a bus and being shut out.

Trivia note: "North by Northwest" made such an impression on the producers of the first Bond film in the early Sixties, they tried to recreate the movie's substance and style in their own picture. Not only that, they even tried to hire Cary Grant for the part of 007. Grant declined because he wanted too much money and because he wouldn't do more than one film. Grant would go on, though, to reprise much the same tone and material as here several years later for director Stanley Donen in "Charade," both films providing romance, excitement, suspense, and humor in equal measure.