![]() Cary Grant is so smooth one almost forgets he's over 50, and of course there's also Bernard Herrmann's vibrant score. "Has any one ever told you tend to overplay your various roles Mr seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actor's Studio". ![]() Ernest Lehman's script is full of wonderful lines, many of them delivered so well by chief villain James Mason that at times we almost want to root for him. Hitchcock takes his time here as with many of the other scenes, but the film is so crammed with memorable passages that one hardly notices it's 136 mins long. In a totally different vein is the astonishingly frank seduction sequence on the train. The former is really more notable for the amount of time taken to build up to the action than the action itself, while the technical work on the latter still looks pretty good. Of course the famous crop dusting plane scene and the Mount Rushmore chase are terrific. Sometimes this film manages the very difficult trick of being both suspenseful and comical at the same time, as in the auction house scene, or the wonderful scene in the lift when the hero's mother turns to two heavies in a lift looking menacingly at the hero and says "you gentlemen are not REALLY trying to kill my son, are you?". Very few other films of this kind attain the near perfect tone of this one, precariously balanced between seriousness and silliness. However, it is all done with such style and confidence that it doesn't matter if it's essentially just a greatest hits package. It's essentially a rehash of many of his earlier films, with a plot partially derived from The Thirty Nine Steps and the very similar Saboteur, while there are borrowings from Foreign Correspondent and Notorious, among others. North By Northwest is not an artistic masterpiece like Rear Window and Vertigo, but it is probably the most purely entertaining picture Hitchcock ever made. ![]()
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