Watch The Espionage Thriller North By Northwest
Alfie Hitchcock is always remembered as the premier master of suspense, the undefeated master of the plot twist. Yes, he was all that, but he was also much more. He pioneered just about ever genre of modern film. He created the slasher film with Psycho, and in North by Northwest, he essentially created the first all-action blockbuster.
We’ve all seen the airplane chase, with Cary Grant being chased through the crops. It’s certainly an exciting scene, but it’s only one great action scene out of several. There’s also the shootout on the faces of Mount Rushmore, and the classic drunk driving scene, wherein Cary Grant is forced to drink glass after glass of alcohol, and then finally put in a car with a cut brake line, so he’s now forced to try to flee the badguys in a car with no brakes, while drunk.
In this day and age, you rarely see this much imagination in action films. There are always exceptions like in the film Shootemup, or some of the Hong Kong classics of recent decades, but regardless, this film has more imagination and intelligence than a dozen other action films put together. Seeing Cary Grant cruising down the street, drunk as a skunk and dodging bullets… It’s hard to get so excited over one more car running over yet another fruit stand.
What this film has that most modern action films lack is context. When there’s a shootout, it’s not just any shootout, it’s a shootout on the face of Mount Everest, so the action is complicated by the fear of falling. When Grant is chased into the crops, the biplane starts dusting them with pesticide, compromising his hiding place.
Hitch was the master of suspense, but he was also the master of putting his heroes in over their heads, and that’s how the action in this film works so well. It’s never enough for one problem to exist, but Cary Grant could never solve a problem without creating another one. This just plain made for better action.
It’s really too bad that the legacy Hitchcock left behind would be so frequently copied, turned into formula, rather than innovated upon and re-imagined. Still, we’ll always have classics like Psycho and Vertigo to go back to when we get bored of the same old kiss kiss, bang bang that we get from so many dull genre efforts these days.
This film, in addition to some of the greatest action scenes in the history of cinema, also has one of the most explicit love scenes: A train going into a tunnel as the hero embraces the leading lady. It’s as direct a metaphor as you could ask for. In fact, Hitchcock couldn’t understand the appeal of the X rated films of the seventies since the idea of explicit sex scenes was old news to him!
If you haven’t seen it yet, the film is one of the all time great all-action movies, and the one that really gave birth to the genre. Without this film, we wouldn’t have Arnold Schwarzenegger jumping out of a plan to catch a parachute in Eraser, we wouldn’t have the excess of Kill Bill. It’s truly with this film that the concept of big, wild action set pieces really began.
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