Recently, I read about the 50th year anniver­sary of this movie in ‘The Hindu’ and hence this review :) [ What a rea­son­ing ! ] Alfred Hitch­cock was sadly con­sid­ered only as a ‘mas­ter of suspense/thriller’ rather he is the com­plete mas­ter of movie mak­ing. He was a direc­tor who never used the cam­era viewfinder to visu­alise a shot. He never wrote a script, entirely cred­ited in his name — all he did was extract­ing the best from the writer(s) and direct them, with a mas­ter­ful touch.

There were spy thrillers, much before James bond pic­tures were released. One of the pio­neer films deal­ing with secret agent was NBNW. I con­sider this as fron­tier to the Bond movies. [ Dr.No was released in 1962. ]

Plot :

NY based advt exec­u­tive Roger Thorn­hill [ Cary Grant ] is kid­napped by a crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tion. Roger is mis­taken for a gov­ern­ment secret agent named George. The gang tries to kill by forcible made him drunk and dri­ven in a car. He escapes from the acci­dent and get arrested. He later tries to see the leader named Townsend in the UN coun­cil — A mur­der hap­pens in UN and of course, Roger was sus­pected for the same. Now he has to escape from the crim­i­nal gang, gov­ern­ment agents and of course, police.

The crim­i­nal gang is set to steal some micro­films and smug­gle them. Roger escapes in a train and meets Eve and she pro­tects him from police. They develop a roman­tic rela­tion [ [ Remember..I said him Bond :) — impres­sive dia­logues in the train ]. He trav­els then to find the secret agent George and meet many sur­prises. He is chased across USA and he pieces together the mys­te­ri­ous puz­zle. The cli­max hap­pens in the famous loca­tion, Mt.Rushmore.

View :

- The title graphic scene was the first in the film his­tory to use mov­ing text. Also, the graph­ics image turns into a real shot [ remem­ber ‘Andhi mazhai’ song’s graph­ics ]. The trivia is that Hitch­cock worked as title designer in his ini­tial days.

- In par­al­lel, the typ­i­cal thriller movie BGM score starts. The music in this film is a per­fect match for a sus­pense thriller. The film begins in the very first shot [ not even the scene ].

- Every 2nd/3rd scene got a twist. Right from the first scene, the viewer is taken into the story with sus­pense. Though the credit goes to the writer Ernest Lehman I would say it’s Hitch­cock, who con­verted them to scenes, skillfully.

- Cary Grant — a per­fect per­son­al­ity for James Bond role. Even, he dresses [ kisses :) ] like a Bond.

- The famous ‘crop dust­ing’ plane chase scene.. The total sequence is 16 mins and for the first 8 mins, noth­ing hap­pens. Yes.. 8 mins the viewer just looks for all cor­ners of the scene for some­thing to hap­pen. Most mem­o­rable scene !

- The film con­tains an equal slice of romance between Cary Grant and Eva. Thank God, he didn’t choose James stew­art [ dreary hero — Ver­tigo, Rear window ].

Con­clu­sion :

Despite of its age [ 50 yrs old movie ], the movie is still fresh to watch.  Hitch­cock pridely owns 53 films in 50 years in his film career — very few were dull. In fact, I started my DVD col­lec­tions with Alfred Hitch­cock movies. The good ones from his bag are [ haven’t seen all his films :( ]

- Ver­tigo [ Can u guess the MGR movie made out of this ?  “Kaa­tru vaaga ponen ” :) ]
– Psy­cho
– Frenzy
– Spell­bound [ Film made in 1945 and still inter­est­ing to watch. also, applic­a­ble for Ingred Bergman :) ].
– Birds [ He threat­ened the audi­ence with crows, spar­rows and seag­ulls :) ]
– I confess

On a per­sonal note, I found ele­gant Eng­lish was used in all of his films [ no sub­ti­tles needed — Ele­va­tor bell dings ! ha..ha.. ].

Happy watch­ing.

:)

Toto.

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