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.
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.
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 really too bad that the legacy Hitchcock left behind would be so frequently copied, turned into formula, rather than innovated upon and re-imagined. Still, we'll always have classics like Psycho and Vertigo to go back to when we get bored of the same old kiss kiss, bang bang that we get from so many dull genre efforts these days.
This film, in addition to some great action, also has one of the all time great love scenes. When the hero and heroine embrace, we cut to a train going through a tunnel. The directness of this scene had Hitch saying "What's the big deal? I already did that!" when the X rated movies got big in the seventies.
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.
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.
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 really too bad that the legacy Hitchcock left behind would be so frequently copied, turned into formula, rather than innovated upon and re-imagined. Still, we'll always have classics like Psycho and Vertigo to go back to when we get bored of the same old kiss kiss, bang bang that we get from so many dull genre efforts these days.
This film, in addition to some great action, also has one of the all time great love scenes. When the hero and heroine embrace, we cut to a train going through a tunnel. The directness of this scene had Hitch saying "What's the big deal? I already did that!" when the X rated movies got big in the seventies.
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.
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