Rated: NR

North by Northwest is the Alfred Hitchcock classic mixture - suspense, intrigue, comedy, humour. Seldom has the concoction been served up as delectably. Hitchcock uses actual locations - the Plaza in New York, the Ambassador East in Chicago, Grand Central Station, the 20th Century, Limited, United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, Mount Rushmore National Monument, the plains of Indiana. One scene, where the hero is ambushed by an airplane on the flat, sun-baked prairie, is a brilliant use of location and now classic moment in cinema.

Cary Grant brings technique and charm to the central character. He is a Madison Avenue man-about-Manhattan, sleekly handsome, carelessly twice-divorced, debonair as a cigaret ad. The story gets underway when he's mistaken for a US intelligence agent by a pack of foreign agents headed by James Mason. The complications are staggering but they play like an Olympic version of a three-legged race.

Grant's problem is to avoid getting knocked off by Mason's gang without tipping them that he is a classic case of the innocent bystander. The case is serious, but Hitchcock's macabre sense of humor and iinstinct for romantic byplay never allows it to stay grim for too long. Suspense is deliberately broken for relief and then skillfully re-established.

Eva Marie Saint dives headfirst into Mata Hari and shows she can be unexpectedly and thoroughly glamorous. She also manages difficult impression of seeming basically innocent while explaining how she becomes Mason's mistress. Mason, in a rather stock role, is properly forbidding.

Robert Burks' photography, whether in the hot yellows of the prairie plain, or the soft green of South Dakota forests, is lucid and imaginatively composed. It was the first Metro release in VistaVision. Bernard Hermann's score is a tingling one, particularly in the Mount Rushmore sequences, but light where mood requires.

TRIVIA:

Jessie Royce Landis played Thornhill's (Cary Grant's) mother, yet in real life he was ten months older than her (both were born in 1904, making them in their mid-fifties when the film was made). As handsome as Grant was, this does look odd in the film, with Landis looking more like a wife than a mother!

Hitchcock had severe trouble in gaining permission to film in the places he needed to. He was forced to smuggle a concealed camera into the lobby of the United Nations in order to film Cary Grant's arrival. When the press discovered that Hitchcock had asked to shoot footage on the Mount Rushmore National Monument, they were scandalised. One newspaper editor even suggested that Hitchcock should go back to Britain and make a movie about someone climbing over the Queen's face.

Indeed, the final chase scene was not shot on Mt. Rushmore; after the press outcry there was no way Hitch could gain permission to shoot an attempted murder on a national monument. The scene was shot in the studio on a replica of Mt. Rushmore. Everything is shot carefully, so as to avoid associating the faces of the monument with the violence.

As the title of the film is North by Northwest, it's interesting to note that Roger Thornhill appears on the left side of the screen for almost the entire movie, usually in the top left of the frame. It has been suggested that the title is a misquote from Hamlet - 'I am mad but north-northwest' - but Hitchcock denied this played any part in the naming of the film. Thornhill's direction of travel is consistently in a northwesterly direction, and he even travels from Chicago to Mount Rushmore on Northwest Airlines.

While on location, Eva Marie Saint discovered that Cary Grant would charge fans 25 cents for an autograph! Wow! That must be one of the bargains of the century! Today, a genuine Grant signature sells for hundreds of pounds. If you could only go back in time to the making of the movie, you'd spent the whole day around Grant asking him to sign until he can write no more!

Much has been made of Grant's supposed tightness. But the comments have been made loosely and flippantly, for you have to remember the acute poverty he dragged himself from (see the biography). It's no wonder that he never wanted to go back to it and made him careful with his money.

Indeed, only those in the comfort zone of a bank account with few noughts on it can make such remarks.

OSCARS:

• 1959: Nominations:
  Best Original Story & Screenplay, Color Art Direction, Editing