Movie #42: North by Northwest

Movie #: 42
Movie Title: North by Northwest
Year Released: 1959

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Notable Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis

Short Description: A hapless New York advertising executive is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, and is pursued across the country while he looks for a way to survive. (IMDB.com)


Rank on the Top 100 Lists (as of 1/7/2013)

AFI.com: #55
IMDB.com: #42
Ranker.com: #86
Lifed.com: #31
Empire.com: #98
FilmCrave.com: #91
FlickChart.com: #18

Note: This is the first movie on my list to appear on all seven of the top 100 lists I used to compile the 251 movies I’m watching.



Date Watched: 9/30/2016

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 (Very Good)

Rationale: While other parts of the movie are good, the auction house scene in which Cary Grant's character Roger Thornhill pretends to be drunk and disorderly so as to get a police escort out, thus avoiding a confrontation with bad men who are after him, was brilliant and stands out as the best scene in the movie. Not so good was an unbelievable chase down the heads of Mount Rushmore to avoid these same bad men later in the movie (Richie Rich did a better Mount Rushmore chase sequence) and that marginally tainted what could have been up to that point a reasonably believable mistaken identity spy movie. Still a very good watch though.