Ernest Lehman and Alfred Hitchcock, 1959 #6 (chronologically) in Mike D'Angelo's list of twelve films to which he would give a score of 100 out of 100. PremiseA communist spy attempts to knock off an advertising executive, thinking that he's an American intelligence agent.
Reaction I read something that said that Cary Grant retired because he "was alienated by the new realism in the film industry" and that, in particular, "the success of Marlon Brando and Method acting meant his own kind of acting was a thing of the past." This film doesn't even try to suggest that these are real events happening to real people. Ridiculous things happen just because they're necessary to keep the plot moving — the one that springs to mind is when the main character pulls a knife out of the back of a diplomat in a crowded lounge in the UN building and, surrounded by dozens of people, escapes by... elbowing them aside and escaping completely unmolested! And the characters are clearly just reciting dialogue — in fact, I'd go so far as to say it's not even dialogue, really, nor are they characters. They're movie stars reciting lines designed to be movie quotes. (Actually, one of the things I found interesting about this film was the way that the dialogue seemed to be an exercise in testing how risque the movie could get while staying within censors' guidelines. But all that does is draw attention to those guidelines and therefore to the artifice of the whole enterprise.) All that said, it's not as though every movie I've ever liked has been 100% naturalistic. Go and Pulp Fiction and The Big Lebowski have the same sort of can-you-top-this flavor that North by Northwest has. But those films were all made during my lifetime and I feel as though they're made in my language. This one, not so much. It is a thing of the past.
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