North by Northwest (1959)

Sorry, this movie sucks

From my favorite movies..

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

A hapless New York advertising executive is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, and is pursued across the country while he looks for a way to survive. Despite one again Hitchcock's brilliant direction and just a cast that delivers well made perfomances 'North by Northwest' just doesn't have enough of suspense and tension that a film of this kind needs to have and besides some cool scenes like the one where the main star was running away from the airplane there just wasn't enough for me to say that i really really enjoyed it as a film. (5/10)

Why do old movies need to be automatically classic just because they are old? This movie is horrible...period. The acting is bad...the story is unbelievable, in the literal sense...the production value weak. Hitchcock and Grant are given much too much credit...both are sub-par entertainers. A critics movie for sure and a waste of time for anyone under 50...

Hitchcock at his sharpest. Art and commerce in a delicious salad with all the right ingredients. A brisk screenplay by Ernest Lehman a Cary Grant that is just pure delight, Eva Marie Saint fresh out of her Oscar from "On the Waterfront" is an icy blonde with a brain. James Mason, the ultimate foreign sinister not to mention Jessie Royce Landis and Hitchcock brings Bernard Herrmann to wrap it all up in one of the most infectious scores imaginable. A real treat.

image4.jpegAction and suspense: A hapless New York advertising executive is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies.Asking which is the best Hitchcock is something like asking which is the best Beethoven symphony, but if pressed to the wall I would call NBNW Hitchcock's Ninth (and Psycho, his Fifth). The coolest of Grant and the hottest of Marie Saint is simply the coolest film ever made from every angle you can think of. Few people would contend that Cary Grant was not the coolest leading man of Hollywood's golden age but this pic is the peak of his coolness, along with that the coolest James Mason ever as the slickest polite villain of all time and the slinkiest Eva Marie Saint ever, all adds up to one of the slickest pieces of celluloid entertainment ever conceived. Most Hitchcock movies have one unforgettable white knuckle cliff hanger sequence but NBNW has two -- the chase out in the wheat fields by a poisonous crop duster biplane and the final chase across the faces of the four presidents at Mount Rushmore, which ends up literally ... as a cliffhanger. Even a third if you include the comical auction scene where Grant keeps making outrageous bids to attract the police and thus escape the clutches of the killers lurking in the room waiting to get him. So much has been written about this picture that there is no need to recount the plot other to say that it is a towering masterpiece of the romantic suspense drama genre with all players at the top of their game - and don't forget a young menacing Martin Landau as Mason's cold blooded sidekick, another great actor who just passed away on July 15, 2017 at age 89. NBNW is frequently rerun on TV so it's not hard to catch up with but it never gets old or fails to make you hold your breath even when you know what's coming next. An ultimate classic.