A Brief Synopsis Of The Spy Film Movie North By Northwest
Alfie Hitchcock is always remembered as the premier master of suspense, the undefeated master of the plot twist. Yes, he was all that, but he was also much more. He pioneered just about ever genre of modern film. He created the slasher film with Psycho, and in North by Northwest, he essentially created the first all-action blockbuster.
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!
In this day and age, you rarely see this much imagination in action films. There are always exceptions like in the film Shootemup, or some of the Hong Kong classics of recent decades, but regardless, this film has more imagination and intelligence than a dozen other action films put together. Seeing Cary Grant cruising down the street, drunk as a skunk and dodging bullets... It's hard to get so excited over one more car running over yet another fruit stand.
One thing this film has that most action flicks lack would be context. The climactic shootout isn't just a shootout, it's a shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore. The chase scene with the biplane has Grant running into the crops only to have the plane dust him with pesticide. Layers of challenge were thrust at the hero and it only kept piling up.
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.
It's too bad that most people who make action films these days have copied Hitchcock's tropes and turned it into a formula, rather than actually looking at how and why it worked and tried making their own stories from there, coming up with new and fresher ideas.
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 seen it yet, the film is one of the all time great all-action movies, and the one that really gave birth to the genre. Without this film, we wouldn't have Arnold Schwarzenegger jumping out of a plan to catch a parachute in Eraser, we wouldn't have the excess of Kill Bill. It's truly with this film that the concept of big, wild action set pieces really began. - 2361
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!
In this day and age, you rarely see this much imagination in action films. There are always exceptions like in the film Shootemup, or some of the Hong Kong classics of recent decades, but regardless, this film has more imagination and intelligence than a dozen other action films put together. Seeing Cary Grant cruising down the street, drunk as a skunk and dodging bullets... It's hard to get so excited over one more car running over yet another fruit stand.
One thing this film has that most action flicks lack would be context. The climactic shootout isn't just a shootout, it's a shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore. The chase scene with the biplane has Grant running into the crops only to have the plane dust him with pesticide. Layers of challenge were thrust at the hero and it only kept piling up.
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.
It's too bad that most people who make action films these days have copied Hitchcock's tropes and turned it into a formula, rather than actually looking at how and why it worked and tried making their own stories from there, coming up with new and fresher ideas.
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 seen it yet, the film is one of the all time great all-action movies, and the one that really gave birth to the genre. Without this film, we wouldn't have Arnold Schwarzenegger jumping out of a plan to catch a parachute in Eraser, we wouldn't have the excess of Kill Bill. It's truly with this film that the concept of big, wild action set pieces really began. - 2361
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