“North By Northwest” contains some three or four breathtaking scenes, which have become classics in film history. There's the spectacular crop-dusting sequence in which Thornhill is terrorized by an aerial menace, a deadly airplane that pursues him in the open cornfields, leading to a crash from which he barely escapes. Alternating complete silence with ominous sound, and long shots with close-ups, the scene serves as a textbook for Hitchcock's elaborately detailed, gloriously deliberate mise-en-scene.
Also noteworthy is the last reel, with a chase across the face of Mount Rushmore, a cliff-hanging episode in which Thornhill and Kendall cling to the rocks of Mount Rushmore, framed by the huge faces of the presidents (carved b John Gutzon Borglum). It's here that Grant wisecracks: “I don't like the way Roosevelt is looking at me.”
One of my favorite scenes–and also one of the film’s funniest and most outrageous ones—is early on, in the hotel’s elevator, when Roger Thornhill’s mother remarks to the two men (who had kidnapped her son the night before and do intend to kill him), “You gentlemen aren’t really trying to kill my son, are you?” The whole elevator, the mother, the villains, and the other passengers burst out laughing hysterically, while Thornhill stands helplessly in their midst.
The title of the picture is borrowed from Shakespeare's “Hamlet”: “I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”
“North By Northwest” employs many of Hitchcock's visual and thematic motifs. Take, for instance, the drunk-driving sequence, with Grant shown in mega close-ups, which recalls a similar drunk-driving scene in “Notorious,” (which co-starred Grant), with Ingrid Bergman as the driver, and Janet Leigh in “Psycho.”
