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.
We've all seen the airplane chase, with Cary Grant being chased through the crops. It's certainly an exciting scene, but it's only one great action scene out of several. There's also the shootout on the faces of Mount Rushmore, and the classic drunk driving scene, wherein Cary Grant is forced to drink glass after glass of alcohol, and then finally put in a car with a cut brake line, so he's now forced to try to flee the badguys in a car with no brakes, while drunk.
Modern action films, for all their big budget and star power, rarely have the imagination of this one. There are certainly some exceptions, there are the Crank films, which pile weirdness on top of weirdness, and Shootemup, which had more than enough imagination, but North by Northwest is still a golden standard, and essentially ruins all those boring same-old same-old action flicks.
Context. The main thing this film has is context. Where most action movies will take a hero and some baddies, give them all guns, and call it a day, Hitchcock's hero is not only in a car chase, he's in a car chase drunk, with no brakes. When he gets into the crops to escape the plane, it covers the crops with pesticide.
For Hitchcock, it was never enough to give the hero a gun and put him up against some baddies with bigger guns. He had to put them between a rock and hard place, he put them into spots where the only solution to any problem would also be the cause of a dozen other problems. 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.
This film, in addition to some of the greatest action scenes in the history of cinema, also has one of the most explicit love scenes: A train going into a tunnel as the hero embraces the leading lady. It's as direct a metaphor as you could ask for. In fact, Hitchcock couldn't understand the appeal of the X rated films of the seventies since the idea of explicit sex scenes was old news to him!
If you haven't yet, see it. It remains startlingly relevant and exciting all these years later, and makes a perfect antidote to the big budget blockbusters that have the scale and scope of North by Northwest, but not the style.
We've all seen the airplane chase, with Cary Grant being chased through the crops. It's certainly an exciting scene, but it's only one great action scene out of several. There's also the shootout on the faces of Mount Rushmore, and the classic drunk driving scene, wherein Cary Grant is forced to drink glass after glass of alcohol, and then finally put in a car with a cut brake line, so he's now forced to try to flee the badguys in a car with no brakes, while drunk.
Modern action films, for all their big budget and star power, rarely have the imagination of this one. There are certainly some exceptions, there are the Crank films, which pile weirdness on top of weirdness, and Shootemup, which had more than enough imagination, but North by Northwest is still a golden standard, and essentially ruins all those boring same-old same-old action flicks.
Context. The main thing this film has is context. Where most action movies will take a hero and some baddies, give them all guns, and call it a day, Hitchcock's hero is not only in a car chase, he's in a car chase drunk, with no brakes. When he gets into the crops to escape the plane, it covers the crops with pesticide.
For Hitchcock, it was never enough to give the hero a gun and put him up against some baddies with bigger guns. He had to put them between a rock and hard place, he put them into spots where the only solution to any problem would also be the cause of a dozen other problems. 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.
This film, in addition to some of the greatest action scenes in the history of cinema, also has one of the most explicit love scenes: A train going into a tunnel as the hero embraces the leading lady. It's as direct a metaphor as you could ask for. In fact, Hitchcock couldn't understand the appeal of the X rated films of the seventies since the idea of explicit sex scenes was old news to him!
If you haven't yet, see it. It remains startlingly relevant and exciting all these years later, and makes a perfect antidote to the big budget blockbusters that have the scale and scope of North by Northwest, but not the style.
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