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www.filmcritic.com - : It was with slight disappointment and definite surprise that I found, after years of intending to see it, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest coming in just under the top tier of his films. Watching Cary Grant hustle through a cross-country wrongly-accused thriller isn’t a bore, of course, but I felt the curious sensation of reacting to the film through a series of comparisons, trying to figure out where it fits on the Hitchcock scale: It’s not as disturbing as Psycho, not as suspenseful as Rear Window, not as mind-boggling as Vertigo. Then again, Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill (who has the misfortune to share his name with a made-up spy) is an ad exec who goes on the lamb with improvised gusto, even picking up a mystery woman as he hides on a cross-country train — so it is, at least, a lot manlier than To Catch a Thief. more...
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www.ram.org - : Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, the style of film making is composed of a few key traits that results in the movie being ranked high as one of the greatest films in my book: The plot is novel and there are plenty of plot twists that keep the audience constantly engaged. Each of the twists is calculated (or mis-calculated) precisely and at every direction (or mis-direction) the audience in told only the barest minimum they need to know. The protagonist gets out of difficult situations in incredibly imaginative ways, without insulting the intelligence of the audience. A lot of the action is ''hidden''---for example, a single sentence at the end by the protagonist explains how he escaped from being held captive at gun point, without actually depicting what happened. As a result, the rest of the action (like the classic scene involving Mount Rushmore) is prolonged in an almost-excruciating manner. All this makes for thought-provoking suspense. Not only do our minds work trying to fill in the (obvious) gaps while we keep guessing as to what will happen next, but we also have to wait longer when we're witnessing an action sequence that is occurring in the movie. more...
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www.cinema-scene.com - : In the 1950's Alfred Hitchcock learned from an associate of a fake secret agent created by British embassy secretaries to throw off the Nazis during World War II. A few years later, Hitchcock had the script with his beloved Mount Rushmore sequence and started filming North by Northwest, the director's final romantic intrigue masterpiece. Though his series was doing as well as ever, Hitchcock's last film Vertigo had bombed at the box office and he was in dire need of something to come back with. North by Northwest, as it would turn out, was the perfect film to do this. more...
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Critic Reviews
