Alfred Hitchcock’s Classic North by Northwest

Alfred Hitchcock is typically remembered as the master of suspense, but in truth, he pioneered just about everything that would eventually become modern cinema. In Psycho, he invented the slasher film. With North by Northwest, he created the notion of the all-action film. While the film has the same sort of twisty-turny plot that we associate with the master, it is defined by its incredible action set pieces.

Everybody knows about the airplane chase with the crop duster chasing Cary Grant through the crops. It’s a great scene, sure, but only one of several awesome set pieces in the film. The shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore is an equally jaw dropping piece of film making, but one of the real crowning moments is the drunken chase. Cary Grant is fed glass after glass of booze and then put in a car with no brakes, so he has to flee the badguys while drunk in a car with a cut brake line!

Modern action films, for all their big budget and star power, rarely have the imagination of this one. There are certainly some exceptions, there are the Crank films, which pile weirdness on top of weirdness, and Shootemup, which had more than enough imagination, but North by Northwest is still a golden standard, and essentially ruins all those boring same-old same-old action flicks.

Context. The main thing this film has is context. Where most action movies will take a hero and some baddies, give them all guns, and call it a day, Hitchcock’s hero is not only in a car chase, he’s in a car chase drunk, with no brakes. When he gets into the crops to escape the plane, it covers the crops with pesticide.

It was never enough for Hitchcock to just put the hero up against some badguys with guns, he had to put his heroes between a rock and a hard place, into situations where anything they could do to solve one problem would only lead to other problems. This made for better stories and 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 great action, also has one of the all time great love scenes. When the hero and heroine embrace, we cut to a train going through a tunnel. The directness of this scene had Hitch saying “What’s the big deal? I already did that!” when the X rated movies got big in the seventies.

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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Originally posted 2010-05-09 04:48:46. Republished by Blog Post Promoter