Screened as part of NZIFF 2013

North by Northwest 1959

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s masterpiece of popular cinema, simply one of the most entertaining thrillers ever made, looks better than ever in this fabulous new 4K digital restoration. With Cary Grant, James Mason, Eva Marie Saint.

USA In English
136 minutes DCP

Director, Producer

Screenplay

Ernest Lehman

Photography

Robert Burks

Editor

George Tomasini

Production designer

Robert Boyle

Costume designer

Harry Kress

Sound

Franklin Milton

Music

Bernard Herrmann

With

Cary Grant (Roger Thornhill)
,
Eva Marie Saint (Eve Kendall)
,
James Mason (Phillip Vandamm)
,
Jessie Royce Landis (Clara Thornhill)
,
Leo G. Carroll (the Professor)
,
Josephine Hutchinson (Mrs Townsend)
,
Philip Ober (Lester Townsend)
,
Martin Landau (Leonard)
,
Adam Williams (Valerian)
,
Edward Platt (Victor Larrabee)

Elsewhere

Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is a masterpiece of popular cinema and simply one of the most entertaining thrillers ever made. We think it most unlikely that you’ve ever seen it looking better than it does now, filling the giant screen in this fabulous new 4K restoration. 

“Fifty years on, you could say that Hitchcock’s sleek, wry, paranoid thriller caught the zeitgeist perfectly: Cold War shadiness, secret agents of power, urbane modernism, the ant-like bustle of city life, and a hint of dread behind the sharp suits of affluence. Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, the film’s sharply dressed ad exec who is sucked into a vortex of mistaken identity, certainly wouldn’t be out of place in Mad Men. But there’s nothing dated about this perfect storm of talent, from Hitchcock and Grant to writer Ernest Lehman, co-stars James Mason and Eva Marie Saint, composer Bernard Herrmann and even designer Saul Bass, whose opening-credits sequence still manages to send a shiver down the spine.

Hitchcock breezes through a tongue-in-cheek, nightmarish plot with a lightness of touch that’s equalled by a charming performance from Grant, who copes effortlessly with the script’s dash between claustrophobia and intrigue on one hand and romance and comedy on the other. The story is a pass-the-parcel of escalating threats, all of them interior fears turned inside-out: doubting mothers, untrustworthy lovers, vague government handlers, corrupt cops… It feels like anything’s possible in Lehman’s playful script. ‘I’m an advertising man, not a red herring,’ says Thornhill. He couldn’t be more mistaken.” — Dave Calhoun, Time Out