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North by Northwest (1959) Poll Winner watch along

🕑 Added 2024-09-06 16:05:01 +0000 UTC

Comments

MikeLL

Just saw this reaction today. Confused about the talk about the title. I'm sure Hamlet had nothing to do with the title. If you look at a map of the US, the action in the movie moved from New York, to Chicago, to Rapid City, SD. North by Northwest. It is a very literal title. Nobody had mentioned Martin Landau's lengthy stint as a cast member of the Mission: Impossible TV show in the 1960's. One of my favorite movies with Eva Marie Saint is the great cold war comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966) (a Best Picture nominee) with Carl Reiner, Alan Arkin (his first Oscar nomination), Brian Keith, and Jonathan Winters. A great comedy.

Clay F

I liked the movie (first watch). "You assholes." Ha, yep. I like Cary Grant. Not that it matters, but I see discussion in comments about if he was gay or bi. Chevy Chase called him a "homo." His daughter said he was straight but experimented. In any case, the guy had charisma. Eva Marie Saint = beautiful. You noticed she is left-handed. I don't notice stuff like that. As someone indicated above, she turned 100 yrs old this year. We traveled trains a lot in Europe the 5 months we lived in Italy in 1990. Did an overnight train w/bed a couple of times. That was a heartwarming ending. Hitchcock could have, for example, had Eve lose grip and fall down the cliff, but Hitchcock chose instead to have a happy ending. As others indicated, that creepy guy is a young Martin Landau. He was in several movies. I watched many Hitchcock TV series episodes as a kid in first grade in 1969-70 -- spooky for me -- and watched some since. That's an early memory I retained. I have watched five Hitchcock movies (my ranking: 1. Psycho, 2. Vertigo, 3. Rear Window, 4. North by Northwest, 5. The Birds). I want to watch "To Catch a Thief" and others.

Kinokind

All of those real locations are mixed with the soundstage Mount Rushmore. And the modernist house doesn't exist, either. But the Plaza Hotel is still there on Central Park, and that mansion in Glen Cove is not only extant, but available as a hotel and event facility! I believe the writer of the screenplay, Ernest Lehman, set out to do a cross-country epic for Hitchcock - "The Hitchcock film to end all Hitchcock films" - and specifically wanted it to end at Mount Rushmore. The title (although probably derived from Hamlet) is, he admitted, arbitrary and meaningless. The thing that always makes me go "wow" when I see it is that camera angle from the top of the U.N. building down at the lonely speck of Thornhill. Also, a word for the great cast: The silky James Mason as the big bad is great casting. Mason was in countless movies, but my favorite is his Captain Nemo in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1954). Martin Landau, as the creepy henchman, Leonard, is also spot on. He well deserved the Oscar he got for Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" (1994), playing Bela Lugosi. And last but not least, Eva Marie Saint turned 100 this year, bless her. One of the many blondes who had to put up with Hitchcock's advances.

Mike Donovan

It's so so good.

Amalia Wolf

Omggggoooosh! Archie is hanging on. It’s very sad

Amalia Wolf

Amazing !

Amalia Wolf

This has been pointed OUT 😂😂😂

Jeffrey Schmidbauer

I also enjoy the classic cropduster scene which seamlessly intercuts location shots with those done in the studio soundstage.

Jeffrey Schmidbauer

Bernard Herrmann's score is riveting in this movie. He was Hitchcock's "go to" guy for most of his 50s and early 60s films. Hermann got his start with Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane". His last movie score? Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver".

Jeffrey Schmidbauer

Martin Landau's character, Leonard was as gay as the movie censors would allow at the time. "Call it my woman's intuition...."

Jeffrey Schmidbauer

I always enjoy the last shot of the movie showing the Freudian imagery of the train entering the tunnel after Roger and Eve climb into the sack together. Hitchcock's wit at its best.

RicoRay317

Fun fact, the National Park Service would not allow them to film the ending on the actual monument so they constructed a set to reproduce it. I think that's amazing.

RicoRay317

Hitchcock movies top 5 to me are Psycho, North By Northwest, Rear Window, Notorious, Rebecca, honorable mention, The Birds and Vertigo.

Chris Harris

I hope that your dog is okay. You named him after Cary Grant without even knowing it. His real first name was Archie.

JM63

Nice catch, I'll have to look for that. Hey you don't have to apologize for your tastes, there's a Hitchcock film for everyone!

Shawn Goforth

This is my second favorite Hitchcock film, after Psycho. Yes, I know, but I don't care. Vertigo upsets me. The set pieces in this one are thrilling, I find myself more engaged in the mystery, the runtime flies by, and I will take Roger Thornhill's style in the grey suit any day over Sean Connery's Bond. To top it off, we get the happy ending; it's a breath of fresh air. You're going to find this ridiculous, but as many times as I've seen this, my favorite part is early on. Roger has just stepped out of the cab, after talking with his secretary. He begins walking toward the Oak Bar to meet his friends, before he is mistaken for Kaplan. On his way through the lobby, he repeatedly looks down at his watch. It's a throw-away piece of acting business that has stuck in my mind for years for no reason at all. Every time I turn on this movie, I wait for Cary Grant to pull back his cuff to check the time over and over as he's walking, even though the time made very little difference, as he was about to have his entire week upended.