Member review

Following from my viewing of 'The Birds' the previous week, my overall expectations for ‘North by Northwest’ had, in all honesty, been lowered slightly, and unfortunately, there was not much cause for a huge amount of change.

For a modern-day audience, I feel as if the narrative was extremely slow in its pacing, and overall, failed to take you anywhere throughout the 2 and a quarter hour film. Some of the action sequences did manage to create tension and entice the audience (after all, it’s still a Hitchcock film), especially the well renowned airplane scene, however I feel that the concept taken for the narrative quickly became over-complicated, and this meant that it lost any direction, literally and metaphorically.

From the opening where Cary Grant, playing Roger Thornhill, seemingly abandoned some colleagues at dinner, to near the denouement where he and the traditional ‘platinum blonde’ (Eva Marie Saint) somehow ended up on top of Mount Rushmore as they attempted to escape the antagonists, too many questions proposed within the narrative were left unanswered, and this caused much of the tension to be lost or misinterpreted as comedic moments.

Not to say the film is a flop, of course it was ahead of its time in the late 1950s, and the performance of Cary Grant is unforgettably witty, cynical, and admirable amongst his frequent action sequences as his character is dragged into this other way of society against his will. Nonetheless, the film seemed dated from my perspective, the narrative lacked pace and substance, which meant the characters were not given much space to develop, but you cannot deny the entertainment factor which still remains after all this time.