PSYCHO (1960) may win the contest for the most iconic scene in a Hitchcock film – ok, there’s no question about it, the shower scene runs away with this one – but NORTH BY NORTHWEST, made just a year before, may win the contest for the most iconic scenes in a Hitchcock film, stuffed as it is with stunning set-piece after stunning set-piece, each seared indelibly into the viewer’s memory. They’ve certainly seared themselves into Hollywood’s memory, from which they’ve reemerged like unprocessed traumas in myriad homages both intentional and accidental over the last fifty-odd years.

Like many spy-thrillers of its time – and on one level that’s what this is, a spy-thriller – NORTH BY NORTHWEST is, of course, a Cold War film, and the cat-and-mouse game (or cats and mouse, given the number of people after poor, if typically immaculate, Cary Grant) that drives its plot superficially derives from standard Ian Fleming-esque cloak-and-daggery. But that’s just the macro-MacGuffin – I won’t give away the micro-MacGuffin, unless I already have – for a film that’s “really” about, oh, several of Hitchcock’s most emblematic obsessions: mistaken identity, gender confusion (it’s in there), the pliability of representation, the ambiguity of culpability, and the … well, the loveliness of certain blonde bombshells (a sultriness-defining Eva Marie Saint this time around).

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman, very much by design, provided Hitchcock with an opportunity to address these concerns on a larger and more audience-dazzling visual scale than he ever had before. So we have, all too memorably, advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Grant) evading an assault by crop duster out in the flattest, most desolate nowhere of middle America. So we have, too, the loaded cliffhanging finale, in which the sight of Grant and Saint dwarfed by and depending on the secular saints of Mt. Rushmore incites an awe both reflexive and strange. NORTH BY NORTHWEST, while still rich in subtlety and wit, is nevertheless Hitchcock’s blockbuster, breakneck and bursting with invention. You haven’t really seen it until you see it BIG. This screening comes in that size.

5/5 – 7pm
136 minutes
$10.25

Coolidge Corner Theatre
290 Harvard Street
Brookline MA
02446