Writer:	Ernest Lehman
Composer:	Bernard Herrmann
Director of Photography:	Robert Burks
Cast:
Leo G. Carroll	The Professor
Philip Coolidge	Dr. Cross
Robert Ellenstein	Licht
Cary Grant	Roger O. Thornhill
Josephine Hutchinson	Handsome Woman
Martin Landau	Leonard
Jessie Royce Landis	Clara Thornhill
James Mason	Phillip Vandamm
Philip Ober	Lester Townsend
Edward Platt	Victor Larrabee
Eva Marie Saint	Eve Kendall

      Between the brooding emotional traceries of Vertigo and the dark urgency of Psycho came North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock's great comic thriller, plotted and written by the gifted and prolific scenarist Ernest Lehman. One of the few films in the genre worth of repeated viewings, it leavens the gravest concerns with a spiky and mature wit. Not the least aspect of its prophetically cool stance towards politics is that it calmly locates treachery equally on "our side" as on "theirs" -- and this during the Eisenhower years, when American chauvinism galloped at full pace. The entire, messy danger precipitated by an early accident in North by Northwest is, in fact, the brainchild of Washington agents, willing to give up a life or two for secrets they consider vital. Never has the entire hierarchy of unprincipled political expediency been so ruthlessly dissected -- and, mercifully, in a comedy.
      It's easy to be over-solemn about so enjoyable a picture, but it's also easy to ignore, by a sort of inverse snobbism, the ever timely issues it raises. In North by Northwest, we watch the ordeal of a character played by Cary Grant, who was for so long our clearest exponent of high-class sex appeal and achievement, very nearly an idol image of success. We're shown the fundamental impotence of his self-confidence in the face of chaos unleashed by political intrigue. But he's somehow never alarmed by any of this, although the single moment of surprise occurs when he's told that the woman who at first seemed innocent and then perfidious has actually been a double agent all along, posing as the enemy's mistress in order to work for "our side." For just a moment, Grant (as Roger O. Thornhill) flinches: "Oh, no!" he mutters, and ever so briefly we glimpse a more attractive humility and humanity long buried beneatch a carefully cultivated urban sophistication and the inbred habits of sexual sparring and conquest. At the finale, he has the chance to manifest at last an unselfish heroism -- if he can just hold on long enough. Literally.
      For years, Hitchcock had preferred the journey motif and the forced name-change to structure a seriocomic tale about a man's search for a deeper, authentic identity and the establishment of a relationship. In North by Northwest, Hitchcock and Lehman gave us the ultimate "fantasy of the absurd," as the director liked to call it. In other ways, too, the film is a virtual rèsumè of the Hitchcock chase thriller, with elements of The 39 Steps (the innocent man on a journey to clear his name of a crime he didn't commit, forced to assume multiple roles, and to trust an initially fickle blond) and of Secret Agent, Foreign Correspondent, and Saboteur. Brilliantly capsuled is the concomitant theme of the hunter and the hunted, as everyone in this tale becomes both. At the center (as in Vertigo and Psycho) is a vacuum, an absurdity, a nonexistant person. Kaplan (who doesn't exist) is pursued by Thornhill, who is pursued by Vandamm, who believes him to be Kaplan; Eve, meanwhile, pursues Vandamm, who thinks she's an ally. All this is carefully presented in the motif of role-playing, false identities, and the constant mention of play-acting and the theater.
      North by Northwest remains, with superb reason, one of Hitchcock's two or three most popular films. With Ernest Lehman's astonishingly composed screenplay -- a model of construction, wit and timeless high style -- and with a shimmering, snappy score by Bernard Herrmann and an array of unerringly acute performances, this film retains a freshness on many levels. There's not a moment of boredom, not an extraneous shot in the picture -- and it's Hitchcock's longest, too, at one hundred thirty-six minutes. Everything occurs with lightning rapidity, and no matter how often you see North by Northwest, it never fails to reward.