North by North West

North by North West

North by North West was an Alfred Hitchcock film in 1959. Hitchcock was famous for thrillers such as Psycho and The Birds and so this film would have created and audience of fans just because it was one of his films.

The trailer for North By North West would have appealed to the audience for man reasons. One main reason was because it was in colour; not a lot of films were in colour in those days, they were mainly black and white so it would have made it very special. Also there were many special effects involved in this film with quite good quality, so that made it very interesting for in those days, to create scenes in movies that are similar to North by North West would be thought to be dangerous.

This film starts with an innocent new yorker advertising executive is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies who want to stop his interference in their plans to smuggle a microchip out of the country. they follow him all across the country whilst he looks for a way to stay alive. 

This is an archetypal thriller for it is fast pacing, tensions building and exciting. There are some scenes which make you wonder just how the main character, Roger Thornhill, is going to escape, such as the auction scene where he had to start a fight to prevent the villains from getting to him.

There was a red-herring in this movie for we all thought the woman, Eve, was a villain, as she was working for the bad guys and she set Thornhill up. However, we later on found out that she is actually a government spy and she was working against the villains all along. 

There is also a cliff hanger halfway through the movie where Eve shoots Thornhill and the movie just stops. But then we see him getting out of a car later on once the detective has taken him away from the scene, presumably dead.

Hitchcock said that thrillers allow the audience "to put their toe in the cold water of fear to see what it's like." The audience are looking at a nightmare. Thornhill was just an ordinary man who was mistaken for someone he was not, and suddenly a murderer, a convict, a criminal. Nobody wants that to happen and so that is a nightmare. Hitchcock explains that if her were to make this film as a proper nightmare would be, then it would not be a narrative, it would not be smooth. But he made this movie into a nightmare being made of a real life situation and so that is why Hitchcock has succeeded in this film.