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Thriller, Adventure 137 min G
Rotten Tomatoes97%Metacritic98IMDb
It's a deadly game of "tag" and Cary Grant is "it"!
Advertising man Roger Thornhill is mistaken for a spy, triggering a deadly cross-country chase.
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Plot-driven, resolved, epic and effortless.
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Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
"Thornhill" (Cary Grant) is your typically fast-talking advertising executive who is meeting some folks for a drink when he is mistaken for a "Mr. Caplan". Whisked off at gunpoint to meet "Vandamm" (James Mason) and his henchman "Leonard" (Martin Landau) his protestations of innocence just get him pumped full of booze and put behind the wheel of a car, the likely suspect of a murder investigation. He has to stay one step ahead of the pursuing police now as he tries to get his life back, a task made more difficult by his encounter with the charmingly enigmatic "Eve" (a rather static Eva Marie Saint) whom he is not entirely sure he can trust. What Hitchcock delivers now is a slowly unravelling adventure mystery with loads of red herrings, plenty of well written and executed humour from Grant and a gradually accruing sense of menace as we finally realise just what is going on. The photography is intimate one moment, all-encompassing the next, the crop dusting scene is the stuff of cinema legend and I challenge any non-American to name the fourth bloke atop Mount Rushmore at the end. To be fair, that denouement wasn't my favourite - it's a bit rushed and rather convenient, but this is
Read the whole review on TMDB***It has its points of interest, but any 60’s Bond flick is a better choice*** When an ad executive in Manhattan (Gary Cooper) is mistaken for a government agent by a foreign spy & his cronies (James Mason, et al.) he finds himself a fugitive traveling by train to Chicago wherein he meets a woman that seems to have his favor (Eva Marie Saint). After a curious encounter with a crop dusting plane everything culminates at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. "North by Northwest" (1959) is an adventure/thriller by Hitchcock with a huge reputation. It obviously influenced the James Bond flicks of the 60s, which started three years later with “Dr. No” (1962), but it’s very toned down by comparison because the hero in this case is not a trained spy. It’s entertaining to a point, but also seriously overrated due to some glaring problems… Jessie Royce Landis plays the protagonist’s mother when she was only a little over 7 years older than Cooper and it’s too obvious; the story drags too much at this point (when he’s hanging out with his mother); his chance meeting with a key character on the train (Saint) is too coincidental; their make-out sessions are premature, unconvincing and painfully dull;
Read the whole review on TMDBSometimes the truth does taste like a mouthful of worms. Roger O Thornhill is a harmless and amiable advertising executive who is absurdly mistaken for a government agent by a gang of ruthless spies. Forced to go out on the lam, Thornhill lurches from one perilous scenario to another. Can he survive to prove his innocence? Is the gorgeous blonde who is helping him really a friend? All will be revealed in Alfred Hitchcock's majestic thriller. If deconstructing it you find that this isn't a perfect Hitchcock movie, for it under uses James Mason's coolly vile Phillip Vandamm (which is a crime), and it also doesn't have a female lead acting with any great urgency since Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall fails to fully fulfil the promise of Kendall's arrival in the movie. Yet this film rightly earns the right to be on any critics top 100 list, to be a favourite amongst the legion of Hitchcock fans (of which I'm one of that number), for it is escapist entertainment in its purest form, Hitchcock's most accessible popcorn entertainment piece. From the moment at the film's opening when you hear Bernard Herrmann's wonderful music, it's enough to send goose pimples all over the body. For it is a
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57 profiled raters. Loved most by The Prestige Hunters; disliked most by The Genre Devotees.
If you loved this film, the television, the book, the music, the game.
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