North By Northwest

Saturday, August 27th 2005 at Union Square in San Francisco

Showtime: 8:00 pm

Presented by The San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation

1959    136 min    MGM One of Hitchcock's most famous films, NORTH BY NORTHWEST has everything--thrills, suspense, mystery, and black humor, as well as dark undertones of sexual exploitation and covert political machination. Roger Thornhill (Grant, in perennially spectacular form) is a successful advertising executive in New York City who is lunching with mother (Landis, the exact same age as Grant) at Plaza Hotel's Oak Room when he answers the wrong page, one for a George Kaplan, and is mistaken for Kaplan. It becomes an identity which Thornhill cannot shake and one that drags him across the country in the face of death with the pretty Eve Kendall (a rather wooden Saint) at his side. The great suspense director was at his most entertaining, creating a helter skelter action film where the hero is propelled from one breathless situation to the next. It is filled with classic scenes--the two most memorable being the crop-dusting sequence in which Thornhill is terrorized by an aerial menace, and the chase across the face of Mt. Rushmore. The title of the film paraphrases Hamlet: I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw," an implication that neither Thornhill, Hitchcock, nor Hamlet is mad. Although NORTH BY NORTHWEST is available on videotape, no small screen viewing can match the Technicolor, VistaVision experience of seeing this one in the theater. With James Mason, a study in velvet villany, but looking dowdy for once, next to Grant, and Landau as a chillingly effeminate gunsel.