North by Northwest, 1959.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Jessie Royce Landis.
SYNOPSIS:
Warner Bros. has bowed North by Northwest on 4K Ultra HD, and it doesn’t disappoint. The image quality is superb, and nearly all the legacy extras are found here, along with a pair of new ones. You get a code for a digital copy too. Highly recommended.
Revisiting a few classic movies this week has made me think about what constituted a big-budget thrill ride back in the day and how it might be replicated today. I’m not necessarily a fan of endless remakes, but some stories are certainly worth telling again in a new era, for a new audience, and I think Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest is one of them.
This film was made in an era where it was a bit easier to concoct an identity that didn’t exist — in this case, it’s someone named George Kaplan, who doesn’t exist but who Cary Grant’s character, the advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), is mistaken for.
The fake George Kaplan is part of a cat-and-mouse game being played by the CIA, and soon Thornhill finds himself getting pulled deeper and deeper into a treacherous web. The “black hat versus white hat” action threatens not only his life but also the life of Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), a woman he meets and falls for but who is actually not just a random stranger.
The way in which Roger is pulled into the story is, of course, so quaint by today’s standards: a hotel page calls out that he has a message for a George Kaplan and Roger raises his hand, not because he’s the person in question but because he needs the page’s help for something else.
However, that seemingly innocent action by him catches the eyes of two men watching the scene, and they assume they have located the previously elusive George Kaplan. They take him to a house where he’s plied with alcohol and sent away in a car, only for him to somehow regain some clarity and avoid getting killed in a fiery crash.
Of course, he ends up arrested for drunk driving, and when he takes the police (and his mother) to the house the next day, the woman living there regales them with stories of the party they had the night before and how Mr. Thornhill had too much to drink. And when he tries to meet up with the man who owns the house (he saw his name on a piece of mail), Roger ends up framed for murder and just go on the run to clear his name.
It’s not hard to see how this story could be adapted for the modern era, with the prevalence of AI images and deep fakes on the Internet. Today, an imaginary person doesn’t need to just be a name and a vague paper trail — he could be a full-blown identity made to look like anyone, and it wouldn’t be hard for an innocent person to get pulled into a deadly web of deceit just because they look like that individual.
This is North by Northwest’s debut on 4K Ultra HD, and it looks as good as you might hope. It’s a very film-like presentation, one that I dare say is probably as close to the 1959 theatrical experience as is possible today. Warner Bros. hasn’t been including Blu-rays with their 4K discs recently, and this one follows that trend, although you do get a code for a digital copy.
As far as extras go, here’s what you get:
• Audio commentary: Screenwriter Earnest Lehman chats about the movie in this track from the DVD days. (Lehman died in 2005.) Sometimes he lapses into prolonged silence, but this is a worthwhile track recorded by someone who was an important part of film history.
• North By Northwest: Cinematography, Score, and the Art of the Edit (23:06): Newly created for this release, this one assembles film historians Jonathan Kuntz and Julie Kirgo, film critic Pete Hammond, film scholar Richard Edwards, author Steven C. Smith, and others to talk about the technical aspects of the movie.
• Destination Hitchcock: The Making of North By Northwest (39:26): Hosted by Eva Marie Saint (who’s still around at the ripe old age of 100!), this is another legacy extra from the DVD days that’s still worth your time. Lehman pops in here too, as do actor Martin Landau, who has a small role in the film, Hitchcock’s daughter Pat, and others.
• The Master’s Touch: Hitchcock’s Signature Style (57:31): This is the kind of extra that’s usually found in Criterion releases, so its inclusion here (another DVD holdover) is wonderful. It’s a “film class on a disc” that dissects Hitchcock’s filmmaking style, with such directors as Martin Scorcese, William Friedkin, and Guillermo Del Toro offering their thoughts.
• North By Northwest: One for the Ages (25:30): Maybe you could call this a “film class guest lecture on a disc.” It features Del Toro and Friedkin again, along with such folks as Curtis Hanson and others, to apply the previous feature’s critical lens to North by Northwest in particular.
• A Guided Tour with Alfred Hitchcock (3:16): The master director enjoyed being cheeky, and this is a fun little travel guide of sorts that was shot with him way back when. It was upscaled to high-def, which results in a sub-par experience (why not just leave it in standard-def?), but it’s still a fun watch.
Since I own the 2009 DVD, but not any of the Blu-ray editions, I can confirm that the Cary Grant documentary found there is nowhere to be seen here, so you may want to hold onto your old discs.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
