Watch The Classic Thriller North By Northwest

Hitchcock is always remembered as the master of suspense, the master of the thriller, but the truth is that he cast a much wider net than that. He was a master of more than just suspense. With Psycho, he invented the entire slasher genre and pioneered the “jump” scene. With North by Northwest, he had a whole other ambition in mind: Creating the first big all-action flick. People remember it as a thriller, but it’s really just a great action film.

Everybody knows about the airplane chase with the crop duster chasing Cary Grant through the crops. It’s a great scene, sure, but only one of several awesome set pieces in the film. The shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore is an equally jaw dropping piece of film making, but one of the real crowning moments is the drunken chase. Cary Grant is fed glass after glass of booze and then put in a car with no brakes, so he has to flee the badguys while drunk in a car with a cut brake line!

Modern action films rarely show this much imagination. There are a few exceptions, the Crank films, some of the work of the Hong Kong masters of action, but after seeing Cary Grant in a drunken car chase, it’s hard to get excited at a muscle car running through a fruit stand for the millionth time, or the hero running amok with a machine gun in either hand.

What this film has that most modern action films lack is context. When there’s a shootout, it’s not just any shootout, it’s a shootout on the face of Mount Everest, so the action is complicated by the fear of falling. When Grant is chased into the crops, the biplane starts dusting them with pesticide, compromising his hiding place.

Hitch was the master of suspense, but he was also the master of putting his heroes in over their heads, and that’s how the action in this film works so well. It’s never enough for one problem to exist, but Cary Grant could never solve a problem without creating another one. This just plain made for better action.

The legacy the master left behind has since been frequently copied, turned into a formula. So few directors have innovated upon it, though. It has so infrequently been re-imagined or reshaped, only repackaged. Of course, we always have Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window to go back to and watch again and again, but still, if only modern filmmakers took Alfie’s imagination, and not just his tropes.

The film also boasts one of the most direct love scenes of all time, depicting a train going into a tunnel. When X rated films got big in the seventies, Hitchcock said “I don’t know what the big deal is, I already did this with North by Northwest!”

If you haven’t already, you need to see it. If you have, you need to see it again. It’s one of the all time great action films, and one of Hitchcock’s very best, and of course, that’s not something you say lightly. Without this film, you really wouldn’t have the action genre that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stallone would go on to dominate. In Hong Kong, they’ve always had the action tradition of Kung Fu films, rooted in Peking Opera, but for the US, the modern action film was born of the western, and Hitchcock.

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