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Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Binding: VHS Tape EAN: 9780790750620 Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Letterboxed, Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC ISBN: 0790750627 Label: Turner Home Ent Manufacturer: Turner Home Ent Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Turner Home Ent Release Date: August 29, 2000 Running Time: 131 minutes Sales Rank: 34793 Studio: Turner Home Ent Theatrical Release Date: 1959
Amazon.com essential video: A strong candidate for the most sheerly entertaining and enjoyable movie ever made by a Hollywood studio (with Citizen Kane, Only Angels Have Wings and Trouble in Paradise running neck and neck). Positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo (1958) and the stark horror of Psycho (1960), North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred Hitchcock at his most effervescent in a romantic comedy-thriller that also features one of the definitive Cary Grant performances. Which is not to say that this is just "Hitchcock Lite"; seminal Hitchcock critic Robin Wood (in his book Hitchcock's Films Revisited) makes an airtight case for this glossy MGM production as one of The Master's "unbroken series of masterpieces from Vertigo to Marnie." It's a classic Hitchcock Wrong Man scenario: Grant is Roger O. Thornhill (initials ROT), an advertising executive who is mistaken by enemy spies for a U.S. undercover agent named George Kaplan. Convinced these sinister fellows (James Mason as the boss, and Martin Landau as his henchman) are trying to kill him, Roger flees and meets a sexy Stranger on a Train (Eva Marie Saint), with whom he engages in one of the longest, most convolutedly choreographed kisses in screen history. And, of course, there are the famous set pieces: the stabbing at the United Nations, the crop-duster plane attack in the cornfield (where a pedestrian has no place to hide), and the cliffhanger finale atop the stone faces of Mount Rushmore. Plus a sparkling Ernest Lehman script and that pulse-quickening Bernard Herrmann score. What more could a moviegoer possibly desire? --Jim Emerson
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - now this is entertainment!
It's the story of a man, who through a series of misunderstandings and coincidences becomes a victim of a spy and espionage set-up. When you first watch North By Northwest you may think, it's a very entertaining movie and nothing beyond that. Actually it is an extremely entertaining story and nothing beyond that. And it is one of the greatest examples of the genius of Hitchcock! He's the only director I know who could take a story as trivial and create such a mood of place and character, that every scene is successful in tone, mood and creative scene development. I feel like I've been put in a ... Read More
Rating: - Cary Grant goes to Mount Rushmore--not just for the sight-seeing!!
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Movie`s hero: "My wives divorced me."
Movie's heroine: "Why?"
Hero: "They said I lived too dull a life."
The above dialogue is found near the end of this classic suspense movie that is even today unparalleled in producing an optimal combination of plot, humour, action, mystery, and intrigue without resorting to clichés. It was directed by "The Master of Suspense," the great Alfred Hitchcock.
Look for Hitchcock's characteristic brief cameo appearance after the opening credits. Some say that there is a second cameo.
Rating: - Good thriller
The addition of pretense can be a killer in a film. It is precisely the lack of such a quality that makes Alfred Hitchcock's two and a quarter hour long 1959 color thriller North By Northwest a better and more enjoyable film than his preceding film, Vertigo, even if the film comes nowhere near the excellence of his following film, Psycho. Whereas the two films that end in -o attempt to impose a deeper psychology into their screenplays, North By Northwest is a popcorn eaters gala pre-James Bondian Cold War thriller. It's no wonder the film was a popular smash while Vertigo was a financial flop.
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Rating: - Is this Roger Thornhill or Bond, James Bond?
This 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film was the fourth and last "spy" film that he did with Cary Grant. The others are Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), and To Catch a Thief (1955).
I realize that Hitchcock was a close friend of Albert Broccoli (James Bond films)and Cary Grant was the original pick by Albert Broccoli to play James Bond, but the character in this film, Roger Thornhill, reminded so much of James Bond, that I had a hard time trying to convince myself that this isn't a "Bond" film. I realize that Dr. No (the first Bond film) came out in 1962. BUT, was Bond's film character patterned ... Read More
Rating: - Slow start, but a great movie...
I had a hard time understanding the whole plot of this story. Apparently, Cary Grant's character is mistaken for a spy and kidnapped by James Mason's character and his gang. But this "spy" doesn't even exist, and it's up to Grant to survive and get these guys. He gets chased by a crop duster, gets mistaken for a murderer when the man beside him at the United Nations gets stabbed, and goes across Mt. Rushmore with Eva Marie Saint's character, who plays a spy and his eventual ladylove. This is full of suspense, despite its slow start. All actors play their parts well, and look for the usual Hitchcock cameo somewhere ... Read More
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