LGM Film Club, Part 553: North by Northwest

We haven’t talked a Hitchcock film in this series in a long time. I fully recognize why Vertigo is considered perhaps the best film ever made and I won’t make an argument against the claim. But personally, North by Northwest is my favorite Hitchcock. It’s really got everything I want. First, Cary Grant is amazing of course. He was always amazing, at least in the films I’ve seen. Only George Clooney has probably matched that easy charm. I was watching Love Affair recently and you know it’s fine and I know people thought Charles Boyer was charming, but compared to Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember (the remake), he can’t hold a candle. It’s true that Grant is probably too old for the role, or it might just be that the woman playing his mother is only 8 years old than he.

Then of course you have the incredibly hilarious dialogue between Grant and Eva Marie Saint (who is among the best of Hitch’s frosty blondes). I mean “What can a man do without his clothes for 20 minutes?” is truly one of the greatest lines ever uttered in a film. And when she says on the train “I’m a big girl now” and Grant responds “Yes, and in all the right places” I mean c’mon! Those were the days of film writing.

Then of course there’s James Mason as the perfect communist cultural elite buying art and working for the Russians and Martin Landau as his not even disgusted homosexual assistant (“my woman’s intuition tells me…”!!!). Plus all the scenes at Mt. Rushmore, honoring that site a hell of a lot more than Trump ever has. In fact, that’s probably the best thing to ever happen at Mt. Rushmore, certainly more than Americans deciding to blow up a perfectly nice mountain to put the stupid faces of their presidents on it. All of this would be plenty, but then you have the beautiful glorious modernist house where the action at the end takes place. Too bad this is was a set and not a real house. I would travel to see that house.

Oh and the crop duster scene. Can’t forget that beautiful scene. In which Cary Grant runs in a full suit no less. And what other than a suit, though without a tie at least, could be more appropriate for the climbing around Mt. Rushmore. I also basically love how indifferent Hitchcock was in explaining the “how are they going to get out of this” at the very end and just going back to the train.

Is this not the perfect film?

Since this is what I am putting below, I’ve never seen the reason to buy new 4K versions of classic films. No one saw them at this level of detail in the theaters at the time. At some point, all the technology begins to chip away at the film’s integrity and the values the directors and other creators placed upon it.