NORTH BY NORTHWEST at The Screening Room

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NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) Cert PG
Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

"A Magnificent Thriller"

Alfred Hitchcock's gloriously entertaining spy thriller offers not only some of the director's most celebrated dramatic setpieces - the cropduster, the chase across the stone faces of Mount Rushmore - but also the wonderful Cary Grant at his most suave and charming.

Hitchcock always claimed that mistaken identity was one of his greatest fears - it's a theme that recurs often in his movies - and this is probably the finest example from his long career, as well as the director's own personal favourite film.

Grant is a New York advertising executive forced to go on the run after he is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies led by sinister James Mason. On his travels he falls in with a beautiful blonde but soon begins to fear that she too might be part of the conspiracy against him.

Despite its thrilling man-on-the-run premise, it's also probably Hitchcock's funniest film, giving Grant several opportunities to display his comedic skills, not least when he hilariously disrupts a highbrow art auction in order to evade capture by both the police and the villains. Pure entertainment in its finest form.