Alfred Hitchcock is typically remembered as the master of suspense, but in truth, he pioneered just about everything that would eventually become modern cinema. In Psycho, he invented the slasher film. With North by Northwest, he created the notion of the all-action film. While the film has the same sort of twisty-turny plot that we associate with the master, it is defined by its incredible action set pieces.
Everybody knows about the airplane chase with the crop duster chasing Cary Grant through the crops. It's a great scene, sure, but only one of several awesome set pieces in the film. The shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore is an equally jaw dropping piece of film making, but one of the real crowning moments is the drunken chase. Cary Grant is fed glass after glass of booze and then put in a car with no brakes, so he has to flee the badguys while drunk in a car with a cut brake line!
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.
One thing this film has that most action flicks lack would be context. The climactic shootout isn't just a shootout, it's a shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore. The chase scene with the biplane has Grant running into the crops only to have the plane dust him with pesticide. Layers of challenge were thrust at the hero and it only kept piling up.
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.
The legacy the master left behind has since been frequently copied, turned into a formula. So few directors have innovated upon it, though. It has so infrequently been re-imagined or reshaped, only repackaged. Of course, we always have Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window to go back to and watch again and again, but still, if only modern filmmakers took Alfie's imagination, and not just his tropes.
The film also boasts one of the most direct love scenes of all time, depicting a train going into a tunnel. When X rated films got big in the seventies, Hitchcock said "I don't know what the big deal is, I already did this with North by Northwest!"
If you haven't already, you need to see it. If you have, you need to see it again. It's one of the all time great action films, and one of Hitchcock's very best, and of course, that's not something you say lightly. Without this film, you really wouldn't have the action genre that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stallone would go on to dominate. In Hong Kong, they've always had the action tradition of Kung Fu films, rooted in Peking Opera, but for the US, the modern action film was born of the western, and Hitchcock.
Everybody knows about the airplane chase with the crop duster chasing Cary Grant through the crops. It's a great scene, sure, but only one of several awesome set pieces in the film. The shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore is an equally jaw dropping piece of film making, but one of the real crowning moments is the drunken chase. Cary Grant is fed glass after glass of booze and then put in a car with no brakes, so he has to flee the badguys while drunk in a car with a cut brake line!
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.
One thing this film has that most action flicks lack would be context. The climactic shootout isn't just a shootout, it's a shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore. The chase scene with the biplane has Grant running into the crops only to have the plane dust him with pesticide. Layers of challenge were thrust at the hero and it only kept piling up.
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.
The legacy the master left behind has since been frequently copied, turned into a formula. So few directors have innovated upon it, though. It has so infrequently been re-imagined or reshaped, only repackaged. Of course, we always have Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window to go back to and watch again and again, but still, if only modern filmmakers took Alfie's imagination, and not just his tropes.
The film also boasts one of the most direct love scenes of all time, depicting a train going into a tunnel. When X rated films got big in the seventies, Hitchcock said "I don't know what the big deal is, I already did this with North by Northwest!"
If you haven't already, you need to see it. If you have, you need to see it again. It's one of the all time great action films, and one of Hitchcock's very best, and of course, that's not something you say lightly. Without this film, you really wouldn't have the action genre that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stallone would go on to dominate. In Hong Kong, they've always had the action tradition of Kung Fu films, rooted in Peking Opera, but for the US, the modern action film was born of the western, and Hitchcock.
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