North By Northwest

Roger Thornhill: Now you listen to me, I'm an advertising man, not a red herring. I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself "slightly" killed.

This is my favorite line in this film. I loved Cary Grant's line reading so much that I stopped the movie and listened to it over again, which is a first for my project. Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest has some of the best dialogue I think I've ever heard in a movie. It was nominated for best screenplay for 1959 and deserved to win, even though it didn't. This is my last Cary Grant film from my list, I believe, and he was just as charming in this as he was in Bringing Up Baby and Philadelphia Story. He is much older in this film, but still suave and his comic timing is just as great. I love how he plays drunk in an early sequence. Eva Marie Saint and James Mason are good also and Martin Landau is creepy as a henchmen here, which was only his second film credit. The real star of the movie, however, is Hitchcock. No one can film sequences and make them so iconic. Much like Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid's bicycle scene, I enjoyed seeing how everything built up to the scene where Grant is chased by the crop duster. I loved the suspense that built leading up to that with the plane in the background and Grant waiting on the dirt road. I loved that Hitchcock chose not to play any music during the sequence, which gave it a feel of reality and dread. This is the first Hitchcock from my list, but thankfully not the last. I'm happy that I haven't seen an outright bad film yet. I guess that's why these are on the best films list though. Well, back to movie-watching!