Hitchcock is always remembered as the master of suspense, the master of the thriller, but the truth is that he cast a much wider net than that. He was a master of more than just suspense. With Psycho, he invented the entire slasher genre and pioneered the "jump" scene. With North by Northwest, he had a whole other ambition in mind: Creating the first big all-action flick. People remember it as a thriller, but it's really just a great action film.
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 rarely show this much imagination. There are a few exceptions, the Crank films, some of the work of the Hong Kong masters of action, but after seeing Cary Grant in a drunken car chase, it's hard to get excited at a muscle car running through a fruit stand for the millionth time, or the hero running amok with a machine gun in either hand.
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.
Hitch was the master of suspense, but he was also the master of putting his heroes in over their heads, and that's how the action in this film works so well. It's never enough for one problem to exist, but Cary Grant could never solve a problem without creating another one. This just plain made for 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 of the greatest action scenes in the history of cinema, also has one of the most explicit love scenes: A train going into a tunnel as the hero embraces the leading lady. It's as direct a metaphor as you could ask for. In fact, Hitchcock couldn't understand the appeal of the X rated films of the seventies since the idea of explicit sex scenes was old news to him!
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 rarely show this much imagination. There are a few exceptions, the Crank films, some of the work of the Hong Kong masters of action, but after seeing Cary Grant in a drunken car chase, it's hard to get excited at a muscle car running through a fruit stand for the millionth time, or the hero running amok with a machine gun in either hand.
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.
Hitch was the master of suspense, but he was also the master of putting his heroes in over their heads, and that's how the action in this film works so well. It's never enough for one problem to exist, but Cary Grant could never solve a problem without creating another one. This just plain made for 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 of the greatest action scenes in the history of cinema, also has one of the most explicit love scenes: A train going into a tunnel as the hero embraces the leading lady. It's as direct a metaphor as you could ask for. In fact, Hitchcock couldn't understand the appeal of the X rated films of the seventies since the idea of explicit sex scenes was old news to him!
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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