North By Northwest DVD

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 Another remarkable Hitch film
Hitch's career was at its peak when he finished directing this classic film. This film is an action packed, suspenseful, Hollywood thriller that still stands as one of the greatest movies of all time. Another testament to Hitch's unbelievable career. Hitch came to Hollywood in 1940 after doing great work in England and made his first movie here in Hollywood called Rebecca. This picture won an Academy Award and ever since that time Hitch has made masterpiece after masterpiece for 20 years. Then he chose to work on the picture North by Northwest. Some people consider this to be Hitch’s greatest film. Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant did a great job with there leading roles. Cary Grant plays a man who is wrongly accused for drink driving and murder and is travelling from place to place trying to escape from the police and people who are trying to kill him. He meets Eva Marie Saint who plays the enchanting blonde women that Hitch always loved to portray in his pictures and from there the plot thickens and the film engages in twists and turns. This film is another example of what Hitch’s cinema stood for. Great technical achievement, great plot, great suspense and great acting aswell as story telling. Considered by many to be the Ultimate Hitchcock thriller, this picture will keep you glued to the screen. After this film, Hitch made Psycho which is probably the greatest picture ever made. It's no wonder why he is regarded as the greatest director ever. Some of his masterpiece include, Rear Window, Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds and offcourse North by Northwest.
Submitted by Joey 34 (L.A California)
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 Hitch's American Monument.
"It's so horribly sad," says a CIA agent in "North by Northwest," "how is it I feel like laughing?" It is a question one might ask of the film. Alfred Hitchcock's first movie after "Vertigo" might also have its serious implications about identity and sexual tensions, but they are kept at arm's length by the sheer delight in malevolent inventiveness. Hitchcock often recalled remarking at story conferences: "Wouldn't it be fun if we killed him this way?" "North by Northwest" remains one of the greatest of all comedy thrillers precisely because of its ability to be at its funniest when also at its most frightening. Hitchcock had long wanted to film a chase across the presidential faces sculptured into Mount Rushmore. He also had an idea for a film that would begin at the United Nations in New York and end in the wastes of Alaska. Another idea that intrigued the director was for a story involving a non-existent character or event. He remembered a conversation with a New York newspaper man who had offered him the idea of the CIA inventing a fake decoy agent in a spy plot. John Michael Hayes said that Hitch invited him to script "North by Northwest" well before Ernest Lehman was given the job. The reason that Lehman was finally chosen to write the script—apart from his impressive credentials, which included such films as "Sabrina," "Executive Suite," and "Sweet Smell of Success"—was MCA's negotiation for Hitchcock of a one-picture deal with M-G-M, where Lehman happened to be under contract. The two began to work, calling their project "In a Northwesterly Direction," a title later changed at the suggestion of M-G-M itself. Hitchcock's exploitation of the dramatic contrast between bizarre foreground and benign background has seldom been more ingeniously demonstrated than in "North by Northwest." A hotel lobby is the setting for kidnapping, the United Nations building for murder, and the stone face of Mount Rushmore for perilous pursuit. Most famously, Hitchcock even injects paranoia into a prairie setting when Thornhill (Cary Grant) is sprayed with bullets from a crop-dusting biplane. It is Hitchcock's most dazzling reversal of thriller cliché: here the dark deed takes place in bright sunlight. It is also a set-piece that is brilliantly set up by the film, establishing a hero who is the embodiment of urban man then suddenly depositing him in a setting where he is small, vulnerable and exposed. And it shows his arrival at the scene from a vantage point that subtly implies danger without revealing what it is. The crop-dusting episode is an object lesson in how to prepare and pace a suspense sequence. Apart from the technique, what makes "North by Northwest" exceptional amongst comedy thrillers is the maturity of its relationships and perceptive cynicism of its politics. The central love relationship has the kind of tensions one has observed elsewhere in Hitchcock. As in "Vertigo," the girl falls in love with the man almost out of guilt at setting him up; as in "Suspicion" and "Spellbound" she makes love to a man who could be a murderer. For his part, he seems only too willing to be ensnared by a sexual siren who might be summoning him to his doom. Politically, the film also has a comment to make about the callous exploitation and abuse of individuals for minor political advantage in a deadly game of strategy, performance, bluff and double bluff. But it would be unwise to distort the emphasis of the various elements. Lots of familiar Hitchcock ingredients are bubbling in "North by Northwest": the theme of the wrong man, the precariousness of identity, the ineffectuality of the police. The ultimate effect, however, is of a dazzling and exhilarating cinematic display, the American Dream played out as potential nightmare but in broad daylight and to a resoundingly triumphant conclusion. Hitchcock might play irreverent games with American monuments in "North by Northwest" but its achievement is such that the film has become something of an American monument itself. [filmfactsman]
Submitted by filmfactsman (Beverly Hills, CA, USA)
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 Awsome Movie
The best Hitchcock/Grant movie
Submitted by impulsehydro (Bakersfield Ca) 
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 A Hitchcock Classic
This is a great thriller. Need I say more? Okay. I loved this movie for how amazing Hitchcock keeps you on the edge of your seat and marvel as how well its shot for a movie that came out in 1959. Great acting all around, and it has a light humour touch to add to its genoius.
Submitted by reservoir_bill (Toronto, Canada) 
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 It's Hitchcock
I didn't expect to enjoy this movie as much as I did. I wasn't a Cary Grant fan until now. Found the actor who played his mother very funny and very likable. Great watch for a Saturday night at home.
Submitted by a reviewer (Alexandria, Virginia) 
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