Watch The Espionage Thriller North By Northwest

Hitchcock is always remembered as the master of suspense, the master of the thriller, but the truth is that he cast a much wider net than that. He was a master of more than just suspense. With Psycho, he invented the entire slasher genre and pioneered the “jump” scene. With North by Northwest, he had a whole other ambition in mind: Creating the first big all-action flick. People remember it as a thriller, but it’s really just a great action film.

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 rarely show this much imagination. There are a few exceptions, the Crank films, some of the work of the Hong Kong masters of action, but after seeing Cary Grant in a drunken car chase, it’s hard to get excited at a muscle car running through a fruit stand for the millionth time, or the hero running amok with a machine gun in either hand.

What this film has that most modern action films lack is context. When there’s a shootout, it’s not just any shootout, it’s a shootout on the face of Mount Everest, so the action is complicated by the fear of falling. When Grant is chased into the crops, the biplane starts dusting them with pesticide, compromising his hiding place.

For Hitchcock, it was never enough to give the hero a gun and put him up against some baddies with bigger guns. He had to put them between a rock and hard place, he put them into spots where the only solution to any problem would also be the cause of a dozen other problems. This just plain made for 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 already, you need to see it. If you have, you need to see it again. It’s one of the all time great action films, and one of Hitchcock’s very best, and of course, that’s not something you say lightly. Without this film, you really wouldn’t have the action genre that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stallone would go on to dominate. In Hong Kong, they’ve always had the action tradition of Kung Fu films, rooted in Peking Opera, but for the US, the modern action film was born of the western, and Hitchcock.

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