Film Highlight: North By Northwest

courtesy of MGM

Cary Grant in North by Northwest

Details

NORTH BY NORTHWEST
Heights Theatre, Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

Related Content

• Minnesota has country's best corn crop in a drought-stricken season, USDA says
  September 12, 2012
• Hitchcock drags without much suspense
  November 28, 2012
• Sever's Corn Maze and Fall Festival
  September 12, 2012
• Amanda Coplin
  September 12, 2012
• Amanda Coplin
  September 12, 2012

More About

• Cary Grant
• Jimmy Stewart
• James Bond
• Politics
• International Relations

A breathless example of old-fashioned Hollywood gratification and the blueprint for every "sophisticated" action-adventure series from James Bond to Indiana Jones, Alfred Hitchcock's well-oiled vehicle for the smooth Cary Grant may not be as resonant as his greatest films (those with the decidedly nonsmooth Jimmy Stewart). Still, the Master spent the bulk of his career working to perfect just this kind of frivolous caper, while toying with what cloistered cinema-studies majors might now refer to as "character focalization," "authorial presence," and "the hermeneutic code" (read: suspense and surprise). In any case, Grant, as the film's quick-witted Madison Avenue ad exec turned wrong man, was never more charmingly, self-deprecatingly debonair. The British Hitchcock may never have made a more American movie, and not only for the many brilliantly deployed locations (e.g., the U.N., the Plaza Hotel, the 20th Century Limited, and, of course, the Indiana cornfields). Oh, yeah—and the phallic final shot is the funniest parody of romantic resolution ever.