North by Northwest

North by Northwest (1959) is Hitchcock's most enjoyable film and sets the template spy thrillers still copy. Roger Thornhill works in advertising. He stands up at the wrong moment in a hotel lobby and is abducted by men who believe he is an agent called Kaplan. There is no Kaplan. Trying to prove it, he ends up implicated in a murder and running across the country. The best known sequence is the crop duster in the cornfield, and why it works is now a textbook lesson. Suspense scenes are built in darkness, in confined spaces, with music. Hitchcock did the opposite: broad daylight, flat open country as far as you can see, and no music at all. Having nowhere to hide is the source of the fear. The idea Hitchcock called the MacGuffin took hold with this film: the thing that drives the plot while what it actually is does not matter. Nobody ever learns what the state secret here is, and nobody needs to. Permission for Mount Rushmore was refused; a chase across the presidents' faces was not allowed, and the set was built on a stage. The final shot is a joke Hitchcock devised to slip past the censors. It runs 136 minutes. Good for: classic thrillers, spy stories, and Hitchcock. Less good for: it is long and paced to its period, and the plot does not reward scrutiny, which was never the point.