Games, must we?. A Lesson in Suspense

It is the eighth of june as i sit down to write, one day after i actually viewed the film and spent time deciding the screen shots to be posted. Not much has changed then, whenever i do watch a film; thoughts as to why the movie was made is a question i ask myself. In recent times of course i can simply say 'money' as to the number of sequels and spin-offs reaching us every friday.
I am not all obsessed with vintage; but it is true that im quite prejudiced to the present.

Go back to 1958, Hitchcock has just finished work on his masterpiece Vertigo although he doesn't know it yet. The British director is furious at the loss of the film and blames the age of James Stewart for the response. At that moment he might just thought about an entertainer and that too a racy one to cool of his mind thus sprang what became a benchmark for the spy thrillers to come and paid homage to in movies even today.
Ernest Lehman, otherwise screenwriter popular for bringing The Sound Of Music to the screen begins writing what is now called a treatment based on Hitchcock's scraps of light namely 'an opening murder in the UN HQ' and a ending climbing down Mount Rushmore. It wasn't easy.

 We are back in 1958, the nascent years of the Cold War on which most of espionage literature exists including James Bond and George Smiley. What Hitchcock does is not something new; the theme of mistaken  identity predominantly seen in earlier classics such the 'Foreign Correspondent', to define the story in one is to simply say that the movie is about a spy who does not exist.

Cary Grant, plays Roger Thornhill an ad-man mistaken to be the federal agent George Kaplan who is hot on the heels of a microfilm with the nation's secrets. James Mason plays his adversary and Eva Marie Saint as the mysterious blonde caught between the two.

Bernard Hermann followed his best in Vertigo to provide another haunting score; a career highlight for the director composer duo.
North By Northwest works for me completely; there is not one dull moment and the master keeps the momentum running, its like I am there in the Grand Central walking aside Grant or in the desert being chased by an airplane, then there is the underlying humor of Cary Grant who converts even the terrifying of threats into mere statements by countering these with his dry sarcasm. The earlier scenes involving Thornhill and his mother and the later auction scenes are few of the best scenes in which the leading man is also the comedian and that too in a Hitchcock thriller but it never deviates from the core of the theme but rather acts as a breather. Grant's chemistry with Eva Saint is immediate and palpable and at times(when they are not kissing) the exchange is far ahead of the time.

Then there is the crop duster chase.
A film which defines the genre, classic thriller and which inspired many others.




Brilliant fan video i thought.

Satyeki