By Steve Evans
Alfred Hitchcock’s immortal classic North by Northwest premiered 59 years ago today. I first saw the picture on television in the ancient pre-Internet year of 1982 and was instantly smitten. Time has done nothing to diminish my love for this film, still my favorite out of some 15,000 movies I’ve seen in a lifelong affair with the cinema. North by Northwest is close to a perfect film. It delivers everything I want in a movie and does it with class. It’s thrilling and comical and elegant, delightfully sophisticated and often darkly cynical, with some of the best writing you’ll ever encounter in a film. The set pieces build in excitement and preposterousness in equal measure, but I never care because I get swept up in the pure joy of it all with every viewing. The early James Bond films owe a stylistic debt to this picture, though it is far better than any of them.
Alfred Hitchcock’s immortal classic North by Northwest premiered 59 years ago today. I first saw the picture on television in the ancient pre-Internet year of 1982 and was instantly smitten. Time has done nothing to diminish my love for this film, still my favorite out of some 15,000 movies I’ve seen in a lifelong affair with the cinema. North by Northwest is close to a perfect film. It delivers everything I want in a movie and does it with class. It’s thrilling and comical and elegant, delightfully sophisticated and often darkly cynical, with some of the best writing you’ll ever encounter in a film. The set pieces build in excitement and preposterousness in equal measure, but I never care because I get swept up in the pure joy of it all with every viewing. The early James Bond films owe a stylistic debt to this picture, though it is far better than any of them.
Cary Grant taught me how a gentleman should dress, how to
light a lady’s cigarette, mix a proper Gibson cocktail, deliver droll &
smartass remarks, run from biplanes and scramble across the actual faces of
national monuments while saving the love of your life in a literal cliffhanger
ending. The final shot of Cary and Eva Marie Saint embracing, with a smash-cut
to their train roaring into a tunnel, is an amusing bit of impudence to
conclude a film that is so damn good I usually want to spin it again from the
beginning, right then and there, soon as I finish clapping.
I wrote a 30-page paper about the film in graduate school.
I’ve owned two videotape copies, a DVD and a Blu-ray. A digital copy of the
complete film exists on my phone, tablet and laptop. I’ve visited many of the
locations where it was filmed. I have a photo of Eva with her autograph tucked
away in the case of my DVD copy.
The common question to this sort of blathering enthusiasm is
“What the hell is wrong with you, Steve?” There’s really no satisfactory answer
except that I love the movies, especially this one. The very best films take us
on an exhilarating ride through experiences many people can only dream of. We
fly in the darkness, cheer our heroes, fear for their lives, exalt in the
bewitching power of story and eventually come cruising down, down, down,
rolling across the runway, returning at last to the seats we never left. And that’s
enough.Cinema Uprising copyright © 2018 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.
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