There are two kinds of
Hitchcock films, to me. There's the red wine Hitchcocks -- the bloody and brutal
thrillers, the nail-biters that make you edge back into your set with fear and
excitement, like "Rope" and "Psycho" and "Frenzy." Then there are the ... morelighter,
brighter affairs, the champagne Hitchcocks, like "To Catch a Thief" and "The
Trouble with Harry" and, released this week on a startlingly good Blu-ray DVD,
"North by Northwest." There's plenty of murder and mayhem in the champagne
Hitchcocks, to be sure -- for all of its dry wit and acid comedy, plenty of hats
wind up on the ground in "North by Northwest" -- but "North by Northwest" has a
brilliance and shine to it that makes international intrigue and mistaken
identity look so much fun.
Cary Grant -- one of Hitchcock's
more frequent leading men -- plays R.O. Thornhill, a New York adman who wants to
send a telegram and raises his hand to flag down the Western Union messenger in
a hotel restaurant just as the messenger's calling for Mr. George Kaplan. This
alerts the heavies laying in wait for Kaplan that they've found their man -- but
of course they haven't, and yet when they abduct Thornhill and he insists he's
not Kaplan, they refuse to believe him -- because that's what the real Kaplan
would of course say. ...
But even while running for his life, Thornhill
finds the time to get in some light flirting with Eva Marie Saint's Eve Kendall,
who seduces Thornhill with the kind of bluntness that works like a voodoo charm:
"It's a long night ... I don't particularly like the book I've started. ..." And
while I know it's become a cliché to rapturously praise how a film looks on
Blu-ray, the fact is that plenty of Blu-ray films don't deserve that kind of
treatment; I remember looking agog, mind struck dumb, at a local retailer
realizing that some genius had decided that Rob Schneider's "Big Stan" deserved
to be seen with the best possible image and sound. But "North by Northwest,"
frankly, is a revelation -- full of amazing old-fashioned camerawork and
lighting that glow so fiercely with glamour and charm that they leap off the
screen thanks to the work of the Warner team. If you're a movie-lover, this new
edition of "North by Northwest" needs to be in your collection, a great example
of how a truly great movie can find a new kind of life thanks to restoration and
appreciation through the work of talented people. Close
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