North by Northwest

Annotation for KRRR! 2025 by Michael Šenovský

When North by Northwest was released in 1959, it became one of the highlights of both Alfred Hitchcock's directing career and that of Cary Grant in the lead role.

It has gained the status of an emblematic Hitchcockian thriller about a wrongly accused individual on the run from the law and his attempt to clear his name. Hitchcock would return to this theme repeatedly throughout his career. He had already tried it out during the silent era in The Lodger (1927) and would continue to explore the possibilities of developing it both during his time in Great Britain during the 1930s (e.g. The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934) and subsequently in Hollywood (e.g. Saboteur, 1942).

Thus, in North by Northwest, Hitchcock honed to perfection the themes from his earlier work. Cary Grant's character, Roger Thornhill, finds himself at the center of an international conspiracy through a completely insignificant gesture and must evade the law and foreign spies. Along the way, he also catches the eye of the brave and resourceful Eva Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who not only returns his affections but becomes the key person in saving Thornhill's life from foreign agents.

These thrillers provided Hitchcock with the ideal conditions to devote himself to the techniques that earned him the nickname "master of tension" - discovering, testing and honing ways to build and sustain cinematic emotional strain. At the same time, as a well-known joker, Hitchcock inserted enough exaggeration and humor into his films to ensure that the stories he told, often constructed to the very limit of endurance, did not lose their appeal.

Hitchcock also chose some of his trusted collaborators to work on the tried-and-true subject. He cast Cary Grant, who had already appeared in a number of his films – most recently as a professional thief on the run in To Catch a Thief (1955). Grant’s role as Roger Thornhill proved to be his last iconic role, and he gradually ended his extraordinary career in the 1960s. The film’s music was composed by Bernard Herrmann, a composer who had worked on Hitchcock’s four previous films, but most notably on the next one… Psycho.