North By Northwest
by Alfred Hitchcock
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll, Martin LandauDirector: Alfred Hitchcock
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 136 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-09-07
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Movie Reviews of North By Northwest
Movie Review: Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Lucas, meet the master...
Summary: 5 Stars
The first thing that struck me about this film when I settled down to watch the DVD is that North by Northwest is now forty-seven years old! (Perhaps I should have waited three more years to buy the 50th anniversary special DVD they no doubt will be issuing.) The second thing that struck me is that today's youngsters who are reviewing the DVD for various web sites have been polluted with so many bad modern movies that they can't really appreciate this brilliant collaboration. Sure, they all give film good reviews, but I also read comments such as, "as good as The Matrix," and "interesting despite all the talking." I think secretly a lot of younger reviewers would have liked this film a lot better if it had more fist fights, less explanation, better special effects, maybe a topless scene, and bigger fireballs in the explosions. Instead, we have one reviewer carping that Eva Marie Saint "isn't credible" in her role. Is Angelina Jolie credible in any of hers? Does anyone really believe that ancient Greeks looked like Brad Pitt? (Check out some of their pottery or mosaics sometime.)
Movies have always been stylized to the eras in which they are made. Excellent as it is, even such a "realistic" experiment in freedom as Robert Altman's MASH now has a certain "hyperrealistic" quality. Frederick Wiseman demonstrated a long time ago the introduction of the camera compromises any hope of "realism." It's a lesson seemingly forgotten in this age of so-called Reality TV.
This may seem a long way from North By Northwest, that most classic of Hollywood Hitch films, but it is not. Hitchcock and collaborator Ernest Lehman turned out a film that was a thoroughly thought-through work *in the world that they created.* The director even shut down production one day till he could figure out a how a character in the film could have known a minor but important detail--he couldn't just ask Lehman, because Lehman was in Europe at the time. Can you imagine a director today worrying because a minor detail was irrational?? Films only get shut down today if the shipments of coke stop making it to the set.
And this is an airtight world we get in N/NW, with every line of dialogue, every scene, every gesture contributing to the whole. There is no wasted motion. No moments that were there just because they looked good (Lehman and Hitchcock had in mind several set pieces that were dropped from the final story, simply because they couldn't find a logical way to work them in.) Contrast this to something like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which though a wonderful film in its own way is filled with scenes that don't really lead anywhere or make sense. (Why not just build Devil's tower in your yard instead of your living room? Why associate hand signals with a series of notes when you don't know what those gestures may mean to extraterrestrials? Why not implant the vision of the mountain into the minds of the scientists too, instead of sending them longitude and latitude readings?) There is something about the way great filmmakers and writers respected audience intelligence back in the days of Hitch and Lehman (and Lean, and Attenborough, and Wise and Wilder and Wyler and Kazan, etc.) that's missing today.
Warner, meanwhile, which owns the MGM catalog these days, did wonders with the transfer of this film. It looks stunning, without a single nick or scratch and no sign of fading. Only the 1950s-style technicolor belies the age. The Dolby digital 5.1 sound is crystal clear, with a very vivid and dynamic remastering of Bernard Herrmann's kinetic score (also available as a separate "music only" track if you wish) and some real sound-effects enhancements, especially in the crop-duster sequence. Don't expect THX-boominess, but the film doesn't need it. For once, DVD menus are effective and clever without being obnoxious and tedious.
Included are two trailers--one features Hitch himself in a tongue-in-cheek narration. Both are anamorphic-unusual for trailers--and both are in good shape for their age. There's also an anamorphic B/W trailer made for television. A stills gallery and cast bios are included. Then there's a scene-by-scene commentary from screenwriter Ernest Lehman. It drags in places, but it's interesting to have. (I'd love to have a second commentary track from a film historian as well.) Finally, there's a documentary, "Destination Hitchcock," hosted by one of the few surviving cast members, Eva Marie Saint. It's interesting and well-done, though I would have preferred even more information than is offered here. How, for example, did they manage the huge train station crowd sequences, back in the days before they were adept at shooting in huge public spaces? (Hitch always preferred to work on studio sets, and used rear-projection as much as he could get away with.) Still, this documentary must have been entertaining; I estimated it to be about 20 minutes long when I watched it, and was surprised to find it's actually 40, so time must have flown.
You'll never get two people to agree on what Alfred Hitchcock's "best" film or films was/were. Attempting to decide may even be silly--best by what measure? N/NW, though well-done, certainly didn't break any cinematic ground. It isn't the experiment that Psycho, Rope, Rear Window, Lifeboat, and Spellbound were. Yet if you were to ask me what his most "entertaining" picture was, I'd name this one without hesitation. Yet it's more than just entertaining. Without moralizing or pontificating, screenwriter Ernest Lehman manages to get in some sly cuts about the Cold War as well as interesting observations on the overly-insulated, outwardly-prosperous, blatantly-hypocritical America of the 1950s. In a way, he and Hitch were trying to show Americans what was really going on while most people led comfortable, fat lives where advertising companies tried to convince us our breath wasn't fresh enough and our cars weren't big enough. It's the evil lurking just below the surface of Betty Crocker America. In that regard the film is plenty "realistic" and plenty powerful...much more so than the juvenilia of the "Matrix" Trilogy.
Summary of North By Northwest
Cary Grant teams with director Alfred Hitchcock for the fourth and final time in this superlative espionage caper judged one of the American Film Institute's Top-100 American Films and spruced up with a new digital transfer and remixed Dolby Digital Stereo. Grant plays a Manhattan advertising executive plunged into a realm of spy (James Mason) and counterspy (Eva Marie Saint) and variously abducted framed for murder chased and in another signature set piece crop-dusted. He also holds on for dear life from the facial features of the Presidents on Mount Rushmore (backlot sets were used). But don't expect the Master of Suspense to leave star or audience hanging.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569670990A strong candidate for the most sheerly entertaining and enjoyable movie ever made by a Hollywood studio (with Citizen Kane, Only Angels Have Wings and Trouble in Paradise running neck and neck). Positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo (1958) and the stark horror of Psycho (1960), North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred Hitchcock at his most effervescent in a romantic comedy-thriller that also features one of the definitive Cary Grant performances. Which is not to say that this is just "Hitchcock Lite"; seminal Hitchcock critic Robin Wood (in his book Hitchcock's Films Revisited) makes an airtight case for this glossy MGM production as one of The Master's "unbroken series of masterpieces from Vertigo to Marnie." It's a classic Hitchcock Wrong Man scenario: Grant is Roger O. Thornhill (initials ROT), an advertising executive who is mistaken by enemy spies for a U.S. undercover agent named George Kaplan. Convinced these sinister fellows (James Mason as the boss, and Martin Landau as his henchman) are trying to kill him, Roger flees and meets a sexy Stranger on a Train (Eva Marie Saint), with whom he engages in one of the longest, most convolutedly choreographed kisses in screen history. And, of course, there are the famous set pieces: the stabbing at the United Nations, the crop-duster plane attack in the cornfield (where a pedestrian has no place to hide), and the cliffhanger finale atop the stone faces of Mount Rushmore. Plus a sparkling Ernest Lehman script and that pulse-quickening Bernard Herrmann score. What more could a moviegoer possibly desire?--Jim Emerson
Stills from North by Northwest (Click for larger image)
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