Alfred Hitchcock’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST is regarded as the template for the modern day espionage and spy thriller like James Bond and Jason Bourne, a huge box-office and critical success back in 1959 and remains one of the best loved of the ‘Master Of Suspense’ works.
Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is a successful New York advertising executive who is having a casual drink with three associates in a hotel bar when a staff member pages for ‘George Kaplan’. Signalling to the member, Thornhill is mistaken for Kaplan and bundled by two ‘errand boys with guns’ into a car, where he is taken to the house of a Lester Townsend, where he meets Vandamm (James Mason) and Leonard (Martin Landau), who are not convinced by Thornhill’s real identity.
Refusing their decision to co-operate, Thornhill is pumped full of a bottle of bourbon and placed in a car on a cliff face where the errand boys attempt to push it over, but Thornhill manages to get away and is arrested for drink driving. With his mother in tow, Thornhill tries to solve the first part of the puzzle, but Vandamm’s men are in pursuit. He takes a train, where he meets the mysterious Eve Kendall (Eva Marie-Saint) who decides to help Thornhill, now well-known in the papers, in an adventure that will take him across the country….
A great classic score by Bernard Herrmann and a well-structured script by Ernest Lehman, who later wrote THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965). NORTH BY NORTHWEST is a superb cocktail of thrills, spills and great chemistry between Grant and Saint, who up the sexual tension throughout.