Shameful #7 - North By Northwest

Warning: the review below has some spoilers.

North by Northwest (1959, Hitchcock)

Before this, I had only seen one other Hitchcock movie, Rear Window, which I really liked. I haven't seen it in probably two years, but I thought since I liked that I'd really love this. After all, Hitchcock is the king of thrillers.

Unfortunately, I wasn't really too thrilled. The story is intriguing (Roger Thornhill an ad executive gets mistaken for a spy named George Kaplan and has to elude men from the "other side" who want to get him out of the way), but the mistaken identity shtick got old a bit quickly for me, especially when he starts posing as George Kaplan and yet is still surprised when people think he's George. The biggest flaw (yes, I'm saying a critically acclaimed Hitchcock film has a flaw) is that we learn that George Kaplan doesn't exist way too early, and so the search turns from suspenseful to tedious. We know he's on a wild goose chase, so it's really just a countdown until he figures it out. 

Near the end of the first act Eva Saint Marie's character shows up to help him, and it's so obvious that she has something to do with this that it's insane that Roger doesn't suspect anything. Their flirting seems almost required by the plot, but to be fair, she has a reason for doing it. The film didn't really grab me until Roger confronts the man who thinks he's a spy, Van Damm, and cleverly manages to get in the hands of the police and away from him. At that point the Professor, one of the people who created Kaplan, comes to re-explain what we learned about an hour before, and things get really interesting as now Roger has to actively fake being Kaplan to protect another agent. That's when the tension really begins to build, especially when the other agent's cover is in danger.

The very end disappointed me a bit though; it takes you right from the climax of the suspense down to a cute Hollywood ending through a match cut, which for me really jarred with the otherwise fantastic third act.

I can't stand it when I don't like a film I know is good, but I just wish there had been more focus on the spy games going on and a bit less of the love story and Roger's floundering. I guess maybe I should just go and watch Suspicion to make up for it.