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North by Northwest (1959)
North by Northwest is a 1959 American spy thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason. The original screenplay written by Ernest Lehman was intended to be the basis for "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures".
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock · Shot by Robert Burks · Cut by George Tomasini · Music by Bernard Herrmann · 136 min
How it was made
- Hitchcock bought the film's core premise, a decoy agent invented to mislead enemy spies, from journalist Otis Guernsey for $10,000; Guernsey based it partly on Operation Mincemeat, the British deception operation of the Second World War.
- Screenwriter Ernest Lehman turned Hitchcock's idea of villains trying to kill the hero with a tornado into the crop-duster plane sequence during a single afternoon of brainstorming.
- Hitchcock insisted on shooting in Paramount's VistaVision widescreen process even though the film was made at MGM; the only other VistaVision production shot at MGM was High Society.
- Saul Bass's opening title sequence, built around the geometric facade of 430 Park Avenue, made North by Northwest the first film to use extended kinetic typography in its credits.
- The crop-dusting plane was a Naval Aircraft Factory N3N Canary flown by real crop-duster Bob Coe; the biplane that explodes after hitting the truck was a wartime Boeing-Stearman Model 75 trainer.
- Because the United Nations denied filming permission, Hitchcock had Cary Grant step out of a taxi outside the General Assembly Building while a hidden camera crew filmed him from a distance, after two earlier attempts to get the shot had failed.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Alfred Hitchcock
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