North by Northwest

New York advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for CIA agent George Kaplan by a spy organization, kidnapped, plied with whisky and left in a car on a mountain pass whose brakes have been tampered with. Despite his having narrowly escaped death, neither the police nor his mother are willing to believe the drunken man’s absurd story. When he himself comes under suspicion of murder, Thornhill is pursued by both the police and the secret services. He flees north-north-west across the landscape of the American West, where he escapes another assassination attempt in a corn field, only to eventually reach the showdown at Mount Rushmore, where he fights on the monumental heads of the US presidents. Described by François Truffaut as “the summation of Alfred Hitchcock’s American oeuvre”, NORTH BY NORTHWEST (USA 1959) was the fifth and final film that Hitchcock shot in VistaVision. The film was comprehensively restored in 2024 by Warner Bros. in cooperation with the Film Foundation. As part of this restoration, 70mm prints of the film were struck for the first time. (hjf)