North by Northwest Review (1959) (Throwback Thursday #13)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Ernest Lehman
Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis, Leo G. Carroll, Martin Landau
Release Date: July 1, 1959
There are some movies where you watch them sixty or seventy years after they were made and, even if they’re good, you can feel every one of those years. The pacing is different, the performances can feel different, sometimes you’re appreciating the movie more as an important piece of film history than something you’d actually throw on for fun on a Saturday night, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that, because movies are products of the time in which they were made. Usually, which explains why so many today are crap.
Then there’s North by Northwest, which came out in 1959 and somehow still moves along better than a hell of a lot of thrillers being made today. Which itself isn’t saying much when you consider how terrible most “thrillers” are these days, but I won’t go off on that tangent here and now.
I’m revisiting this one under sad circumstances, because Eva Marie Saint passed away Tuesday at the remarkable age of 102. Saint had one hell of a career, winning an Academy Award for her very first movie, On the Waterfront, working with some of the biggest stars and directors Hollywood ever produced, and continuing to act decades after most of her contemporaries were gone. There are plenty of her movies you could choose to watch in remembrance, and On the Waterfront would certainly be an obvious one, but for Throwback Thursday, I’m going with Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Mount Rushmore, and one crop-dusting son of a bitch that has nothing better to do than chase a man across an empty field.
In other words, we’re watching North by Northwest.
Cary Grant stars as Roger Thornhill, a successful New York advertising executive who makes the unfortunate mistake of raising his hand at exactly the wrong moment and is subsequently mistaken for a man named George Kaplan. That’s bad enough, except the people looking for Kaplan aren’t trying to serve him with a subpoena or ask him a few questions, they’re spies working for Phillip Vandamm, played by James Mason, and before Thornhill really understands what the hell is happening, he’s kidnapped, interrogated and staring down the possibility that his day is about to end considerably worse than it started.
The beautiful thing is that George Kaplan doesn’t exist. Spoiler warning, but come on, this was made in 1959. I think the grace period has passed.
Thornhill doesn’t know that, of course, and neither do the people chasing him, which means he’s stuck trying to prove that he isn’t a fictional person while increasingly convincing everybody around him that he probably is. Things go from bad to worse, a man ends up dead at the United Nations, Thornhill gets blamed for the murder, and suddenly this perfectly ordinary advertising executive is running across the country trying to figure out who George Kaplan is while the police and Vandamm’s people are both looking for him.
That’s a simple setup, and Hitchcock squeezes damn near everything imaginable out of it.
You get murder, espionage, romance, comedy, mistaken identity, trains, planes, Mount Rushmore, one of the coolest villains of the era, and Cary Grant spending a significant portion of the movie looking like he’d really appreciate somebody sitting him down and explaining just what the hell is going on. I spend a lot of days like that.
And then Eva Marie Saint walks into his train compartment.
Saint plays Eve Kendall, who meets Thornhill aboard the 20th Century Limited while he’s trying to get out of New York without being arrested, and from the moment she appears, you know there’s more going on with this woman than she’s telling him.
Thornhill probably knows it too; he just doesn’t particularly care.
Can’t really blame the man.
Saint is fantastic in this movie because she has to be several things at once: seductive without becoming ridiculous, mysterious without looking like she’s deliberately walking around with a giant sign saying I HAVE A SECRET, vulnerable when the story needs her to be, and believable when we begin learning just how much more complicated Eve’s situation actually is. She’s playing opposite Cary Grant, who could charm a brick wall for two hours and probably convince you the wall was enjoying itself, and Saint has absolutely no problem matching him.
Their scenes on the train are some of my favorites in the movie because you can almost forget for a little while that Thornhill is wanted for murder and being hunted by spies. Grant and Saint just have that old-school movie-star chemistry that you can’t manufacture, and Hitchcock lets the two of them flirt their way through scenes that would probably collapse without the right actors.
These aren’t two teenagers stumbling through some grand first love, they’re two intelligent adults who know perfectly well that they’re attracted to each other and aren’t especially interested in pretending otherwise. Eve is cool, confident, and seemingly always a couple of steps ahead of Thornhill, while Thornhill is Cary Grant, so I suppose he figures that’s usually enough.
It usually was.
What makes Saint’s performance even better on a rewatch is knowing what Eve is actually doing, because suddenly little looks and choices that seemed like simple flirtation have another meaning. She’s attracted to Thornhill, but she’s also manipulating him, protecting something much bigger than him, putting herself in danger, and trying to maintain control over a situation that keeps getting more complicated every time Roger Thornhill refuses to do the sensible thing and go away.
Thank God he doesn’t.
Even if you’ve never watched North by Northwest, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen the crop-duster scene.
It’s one of those pieces of cinema that escaped the movie it came from and became part of popular culture all by itself, Cary Grant standing alongside an empty road in the middle of nowhere while a crop-dusting plane gradually becomes a much bigger problem than any crop-dusting plane has a right to be.
What I love about the sequence is how little Hitchcock needs to make it work. There’s no giant action score telling you to be nervous, nobody is delivering some villainous speech, and there isn’t an army of bad guys pouring out of SUVs with machine guns. For a long stretch, it’s basically just Cary Grant, an empty landscape, and a plane.
That’s it.
And it’s fantastic.
Hitchcock lets the emptiness do the work, because Thornhill is standing out there waiting for George Kaplan, there’s nowhere to hide, something doesn’t feel right, and eventually that plane in the distance starts coming toward him. Once it does, the whole thing explodes into one of the most famous chase sequences ever filmed, and more than sixty years later it still works. Not really surprising when you consider who directed this.
Hitchcock understood suspense well enough that he didn’t need to constantly scream at the audience. He knew when to let something breathe, when to make you wait, and when to finally unleash the chaos.
Also, whoever came up with the plan to murder Roger Thornhill with a crop duster deserves some credit for creativity, although I’m not entirely convinced this was the most efficient assassination method available in 1959.
There are certain actors where you can spend a thousand words analyzing exactly what they’re doing, and then there are actors where eventually you just have to shrug and say, well, that’s Cary Grant. Obviously, it’d have to be a film with Cary Grant. You wouldn’t watch Homeward Bound and say, “well, that’s Cary Grant.”
Grant is ridiculously good here.
Roger Thornhill could easily have become an irritating character because the man spends much of the movie stumbling into situations he doesn’t understand, but Grant gives him enough intelligence, humor and effortless charm that you enjoy watching him try to bullshit his way out of everything. He’s not James Bond, he isn’t secretly a trained killer who has been waiting his entire life for this moment; he’s an advertising executive who got dragged into somebody else’s spy story and is trying to stay alive long enough to understand the plot.
That makes the action better because Thornhill isn’t supposed to be capable of any of this.
He’s improvising, and sometimes doing that very poorly, as would be expected.
James Mason is equally good as Vandamm, and I love villains like this because he doesn’t need to spend the entire movie screaming to convince you he’s dangerous. Mason is calm, intelligent, and sophisticated, which makes him more threatening than somebody chewing the scenery and announcing how evil he is every five minutes. Martin Landau is also excellent as Leonard, Vandamm’s right-hand man, and there’s a coldness to the two of them that contrasts perfectly with Grant’s increasingly desperate improvisation.
The cast as a whole is just ridiculously good, which I suppose shouldn’t be surprising when you’re talking about a Hitchcock movie starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason and Martin Landau. Even Jessie Royce Landis as Thornhill’s mother gets some great moments, particularly because she seems considerably less concerned about her son’s claims that dangerous men are trying to kill him than Roger would probably prefer.
Maybe that’s why he became an advertising executive. He needed attention.
Eventually all of these threads lead to Mount Rushmore, because apparently Hitchcock looked at one of America’s most recognizable monuments and thought, yeah, somebody should probably be dangling off George Washington’s face.
And he was right.
The climax is pure old Hollywood spectacle, but what’s remarkable is how naturally the movie gets there. North by Northwest starts with a guy raising his hand in a hotel bar and ends with international espionage and people hanging off Mount Rushmore, and somehow at no point does the escalation feel completely ridiculous.
Okay, maybe it feels a little ridiculous.
But it’s the good kind, the kind of almost-stupidity that we favor here in the Halls.
That’s another reason the movie holds up so well, and it’s because Hitchcock isn’t afraid to have fun with the thing. North by Northwest is a thriller, but it’s funny, romantic, and adventurous too, and it never becomes so impressed with itself that everybody has to walk around looking miserable. There are real stakes, people die, Eve is genuinely in danger, but the movie still understands that watching Cary Grant get dragged into an increasingly insane spy conspiracy is supposed to be entertaining.
It absolutely is.
The more old movies I watch, the less patience I have for the idea that something is automatically too old for a “modern audience.” Maybe too smart for a modern audience, and usually more offensive to a modern audience, but nothing is too old. Sure, styles change, technology changes and pacing changes, but good filmmaking doesn’t suddenly stop working because almost everybody on screen has been dead for a while.
North by Northwest is Exhibit A.
This movie is more than two hours long, yet it rarely feels like it. The story keeps moving, the locations keep changing, the mystery keeps developing, and every time Thornhill thinks he finally understands what’s happening, Hitchcock gives him another problem. There are movies made sixty years later with twice the explosions, ten times the visual effects, and absolutely none of this movie’s momentum. And usually some lazily written “girlboss” taking down the patriarchy while stopping every twenty minutes to lecture the men in the audience, because apparently that’s character development now. Imagine this movie today; ah, never mind, I’m not boarding that train.
And it looks gorgeous.
There’s a confidence to movies from this era that I love, where a director could put two movie stars on a train, let them talk to each other for several minutes, and trust that the audience wouldn’t spontaneously combust because something hadn’t exploded recently, and the characters didn’t have to stop and recap the plot every time there’d been a new development just to make sure everybody watching was still following along.
Imagine that.
Watching North by Northwest today obviously feels a little different than it would have a week ago.
Eva Marie Saint died on October 6, 2026, at 102 years old, which is one hell of a life, and she leaves behind the kind of career very few people ever get to have. She won an Oscar for On the Waterfront, worked with some of the greatest filmmakers and actors Hollywood ever produced, continued acting late into her life, and left behind performances that people are still watching generations after they were made.
That’s immortality of a sort, I suppose.
There’s something special about being able to put on a movie made in 1959 and watch somebody who is no longer here suddenly become young again. Eva Marie Saint is forever stepping onto that train, forever looking across the table at Cary Grant, forever Eve Kendall, cool and mysterious and completely in control until the story starts pulling that control away from her.
I don’t want to turn a movie review into an obituary, because that isn’t what Throwback Thursday is, and frankly I think the better tribute is simply to watch the woman work.
And in North by Northwest, she was damn good at it.
I don’t know how much more you can reasonably ask from a movie like this. Cary Grant is Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint is terrific, James Mason is a fantastic villain, Bernard Herrmann’s score is unmistakable, Hitchcock directs the hell out of it, the crop-duster sequence remains one of the great suspense scenes in movie history, and the Mount Rushmore climax is still a hell of a way to finish things.
North by Northwest was released in 1959, which means we’re talking about a movie that’s pushing seventy years old, and I could put it on tonight and enjoy it more than the majority of thrillers I’ve watched from the last decade. That’s not nostalgia talking either, because I didn’t grow up in 1959 and I certainly wasn’t sitting in a theater opening weekend wondering whether Cary Grant was going to make it off Mount Rushmore. Well, it’s possible that I was, but not as Gary Smith, and how the hell would I know? But I don’t discount the possibility.
It’s simply a great movie.
This week’s Throwback Thursday came about for a reason I wish it hadn’t, but if the passing of Eva Marie Saint sends a few people back to North by Northwest, or introduces somebody to it for the first time, that’s not a bad way to spend an evening.
Rest in peace, Eva Marie Saint, and thank you for the movies.
You made one hell of a dent.
North by Northwest gets a five out of five: EXALTED.
If you enjoyed this one, check out my reviews of Sergeant York (1941) and Charade (1963) from the Audrey Hepburn rewatch series. You can also browse the full Throwback Thursday archives by clicking here.
