Alfie Hitchcock is always remembered as the premier master of suspense, the undefeated master of the plot twist. Yes, he was all that, but he was also much more. He pioneered just about ever genre of modern film. He created the slasher film with Psycho, and in North by Northwest, he essentially created the first all-action blockbuster.
We've all seen the airplane chase, with Cary Grant being chased through the crops. It's certainly an exciting scene, but it's only one great action scene out of several. There's also the shootout on the faces of Mount Rushmore, and the classic drunk driving scene, wherein Cary Grant is forced to drink glass after glass of alcohol, and then finally put in a car with a cut brake line, so he's now forced to try to flee the badguys in a car with no brakes, while drunk.
Modern action films, for all their big budget and star power, rarely have the imagination of this one. There are certainly some exceptions, there are the Crank films, which pile weirdness on top of weirdness, and Shootemup, which had more than enough imagination, but North by Northwest is still a golden standard, and essentially ruins all those boring same-old same-old action flicks.
What this film has that most modern action films lack is context. When there's a shootout, it's not just any shootout, it's a shootout on the face of Mount Everest, so the action is complicated by the fear of falling. When Grant is chased into the crops, the biplane starts dusting them with pesticide, compromising his hiding place.
It was never enough for Hitchcock to just put the hero up against some badguys with guns, he had to put his heroes between a rock and a hard place, into situations where anything they could do to solve one problem would only lead to other problems. This made for better stories and better action.
It's really too bad that the legacy Hitchcock left behind would be so frequently copied, turned into formula, rather than innovated upon and re-imagined. Still, we'll always have classics like Psycho and Vertigo to go back to when we get bored of the same old kiss kiss, bang bang that we get from so many dull genre efforts these days.
This film, in addition to some great action, also has one of the all time great love scenes. When the hero and heroine embrace, we cut to a train going through a tunnel. The directness of this scene had Hitch saying "What's the big deal? I already did that!" when the X rated movies got big in the seventies.
If you haven't seen it yet, the film is one of the all time great all-action movies, and the one that really gave birth to the genre. Without this film, we wouldn't have Arnold Schwarzenegger jumping out of a plan to catch a parachute in Eraser, we wouldn't have the excess of Kill Bill. It's truly with this film that the concept of big, wild action set pieces really began.
We've all seen the airplane chase, with Cary Grant being chased through the crops. It's certainly an exciting scene, but it's only one great action scene out of several. There's also the shootout on the faces of Mount Rushmore, and the classic drunk driving scene, wherein Cary Grant is forced to drink glass after glass of alcohol, and then finally put in a car with a cut brake line, so he's now forced to try to flee the badguys in a car with no brakes, while drunk.
Modern action films, for all their big budget and star power, rarely have the imagination of this one. There are certainly some exceptions, there are the Crank films, which pile weirdness on top of weirdness, and Shootemup, which had more than enough imagination, but North by Northwest is still a golden standard, and essentially ruins all those boring same-old same-old action flicks.
What this film has that most modern action films lack is context. When there's a shootout, it's not just any shootout, it's a shootout on the face of Mount Everest, so the action is complicated by the fear of falling. When Grant is chased into the crops, the biplane starts dusting them with pesticide, compromising his hiding place.
It was never enough for Hitchcock to just put the hero up against some badguys with guns, he had to put his heroes between a rock and a hard place, into situations where anything they could do to solve one problem would only lead to other problems. This made for better stories and better action.
It's really too bad that the legacy Hitchcock left behind would be so frequently copied, turned into formula, rather than innovated upon and re-imagined. Still, we'll always have classics like Psycho and Vertigo to go back to when we get bored of the same old kiss kiss, bang bang that we get from so many dull genre efforts these days.
This film, in addition to some great action, also has one of the all time great love scenes. When the hero and heroine embrace, we cut to a train going through a tunnel. The directness of this scene had Hitch saying "What's the big deal? I already did that!" when the X rated movies got big in the seventies.
If you haven't seen it yet, the film is one of the all time great all-action movies, and the one that really gave birth to the genre. Without this film, we wouldn't have Arnold Schwarzenegger jumping out of a plan to catch a parachute in Eraser, we wouldn't have the excess of Kill Bill. It's truly with this film that the concept of big, wild action set pieces really began.
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