North By Northwest - 1959 - 4 Stars

Actors: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Note: Spoilers Ahead, but even if you haven't seen the film, you'll already know them

North By Northwest, like Psycho, is a film best seen without any awareness of what's about to happen. In our reference-obsessed culture, this is absolutely impossible - surely North By Northwest's two most iconic scenes are already ruined. In fact, they are ruined enough for us to question the plausibility of both of them, even as we watch them for the first time. The 'airplane' scene is rather incredible, but even our protagonist comments on its absurdity in a later scene. The climactic scene down Mount Rushmore falls prey to typical cinema convention - I was just waiting for the scene to wrap up so the film could end.

Regardless, it's an enjoyable film that asks a real simple question from the very beginning - what if a shadowy, powerful organization thought you were a spy? How could you go about proving that you weren't? It's a deeply paranoid film - sometimes I wonder how Hitchcock's works were so popular. However, the protagonist may as well be named John Everyman - he and everyone else are kept mostly traitless, as they continue deceiving one another.

The plot of the film is masterful overall, despite the scene where several characters nicely provide all of the exposition we need for the film - there's a lot of plot to carry, and a lot of off-screen drama we really cannot be privy to without making the exposition even more tedious. Hitchcock even throws in a MacGuffin, though he invests so little in it that I'm not even sure it's a successful usage of the practice.