North by Northwest: Hitchcock’s funniest, most ambitious film

Every scene in Cary Grant’s mistaken identity caper is pure absurdity – including that famous cornfield chase. You can’t look away

I

magine: you’re a handsome and relatively successful ad man in idyllic 50s New York. You’re having a delicious mid-afternoon snack in the lobby of the Plaza hotel, which presumably cost all of $2.50, when suddenly you are abducted in broad daylight at gunpoint by two polite and well-dressed men. You don’t put up a fight. You merely walk with them to their car, trying to object in the only way you know how: asking nicely for them to stop. The kidnappers are gleeful; they’ve finally captured you, George Kaplan. That’s not your name, you exclaim, you’re Roger Thornhill! They must have the wrong man!

Thus begins Hitchcock’s funniest, most ridiculous and visually ambitious film, North by Northwest. All the hallmarks of a Hitchcock classic are here: Cary Grant as the leading man, a completely inexplicable MacGuffin (who is George Kaplan anyway? And more importantly, does anyone even care?), a director cameo, a mysterious and beautiful blonde (the darling and charming Eva Marie Saint), and a 20-minute opening so overstuffed with dialogue that you kind of tune out but it’s fine because once the inciting incident happens, you can’t look away. It’s so Hitchcockian that it borders on parody.