Thriller #4 - North By Northwest (1959)

North By Northwest is another Hitchcock, this time with Cary Grant and a different icy blonde, Eva Marie Saint. In case you're not in the know, this is the movie where Cary Grant gets chased by a crop duster - I'm sure you've seen that scene before. Watching that part was kind of surreal - Here was this thirty seconds of film that was so familiar to me because I'd just seen it so many times, right in the middle of this movie I'd never seen before. It made me think a lot of how much of an impact movies have on our culture - I'd never seen this movie and yet this one little section of film has been in my life for years and years. And then I sort of lost that train of thought and continued watching the movie, but for a second I was really on the verge of an epiphany about mass culture and the effect of fiction on our lives. It was pretty intense.

North By Northwest confuses me a little bit - I follow the characters and the overall plot, but I'm confused by the storyline. Cary Grant's character whose name I can't remember is suddenly being mistaken for a spy in an unnamed government agency, is blamed for the death of a man, and is forced to go on the lam - Which only rhymed by accident, by the way. I get all that. What I'm confused about is what Cary Grant is trying to do the whole movie, other than avoid being killed. I think he's trying to find the spy he's being mistaken for, but I'm just not quite sure.

I did like North By Northwest - It was a fun movie and it had a really cool, 50's spy atmosphere. Hitchcock, I've noticed, is really great at atmosphere. Cary Grant was good, of course, and Eva Marie Saint was really cool and icy and elegant. I liked the whole movie and I thought it was cool because they announced the Michigan railroad line in the train station. There was a really big train motif in this movie. I liked North By Northwest, but I wasn't quite as wowed by it as I have been by other Hitchcock movies.