Alfie Hitchcock is always remembered as the premier master of suspense, the undefeated master of the plot twist. Yes, he was all that, but he was also much more. He pioneered just about ever genre of modern film. He created the slasher film with Psycho, and in North by Northwest, he essentially created the first all-action blockbuster.
Everybody knows about the airplane chase with the crop duster chasing Cary Grant through the crops. It's a great scene, sure, but only one of several awesome set pieces in the film. The shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore is an equally jaw dropping piece of film making, but one of the real crowning moments is the drunken chase. Cary Grant is fed glass after glass of booze and then put in a car with no brakes, so he has to flee the badguys while drunk in a car with a cut brake line!
In this day and age, you rarely see this much imagination in action films. There are always exceptions like in the film Shootemup, or some of the Hong Kong classics of recent decades, but regardless, this film has more imagination and intelligence than a dozen other action films put together. Seeing Cary Grant cruising down the street, drunk as a skunk and dodging bullets... It's hard to get so excited over one more car running over yet another fruit stand.
One thing this film has that most action flicks lack would be context. The climactic shootout isn't just a shootout, it's a shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore. The chase scene with the biplane has Grant running into the crops only to have the plane dust him with pesticide. Layers of challenge were thrust at the hero and it only kept piling up.
It was never enough for Hitchcock to just put the hero up against some badguys with guns, he had to put his heroes between a rock and a hard place, into situations where anything they could do to solve one problem would only lead to other problems. This made for better stories and better action.
The legacy the master left behind has since been frequently copied, turned into a formula. So few directors have innovated upon it, though. It has so infrequently been re-imagined or reshaped, only repackaged. Of course, we always have Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window to go back to and watch again and again, but still, if only modern filmmakers took Alfie's imagination, and not just his tropes.
This film, in addition to some of the greatest action scenes in the history of cinema, also has one of the most explicit love scenes: A train going into a tunnel as the hero embraces the leading lady. It's as direct a metaphor as you could ask for. In fact, Hitchcock couldn't understand the appeal of the X rated films of the seventies since the idea of explicit sex scenes was old news to him!
If you haven't yet, see it. It remains startlingly relevant and exciting all these years later, and makes a perfect antidote to the big budget blockbusters that have the scale and scope of North by Northwest, but not the style. - 40724
Everybody knows about the airplane chase with the crop duster chasing Cary Grant through the crops. It's a great scene, sure, but only one of several awesome set pieces in the film. The shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore is an equally jaw dropping piece of film making, but one of the real crowning moments is the drunken chase. Cary Grant is fed glass after glass of booze and then put in a car with no brakes, so he has to flee the badguys while drunk in a car with a cut brake line!
In this day and age, you rarely see this much imagination in action films. There are always exceptions like in the film Shootemup, or some of the Hong Kong classics of recent decades, but regardless, this film has more imagination and intelligence than a dozen other action films put together. Seeing Cary Grant cruising down the street, drunk as a skunk and dodging bullets... It's hard to get so excited over one more car running over yet another fruit stand.
One thing this film has that most action flicks lack would be context. The climactic shootout isn't just a shootout, it's a shootout on the face of Mt. Rushmore. The chase scene with the biplane has Grant running into the crops only to have the plane dust him with pesticide. Layers of challenge were thrust at the hero and it only kept piling up.
It was never enough for Hitchcock to just put the hero up against some badguys with guns, he had to put his heroes between a rock and a hard place, into situations where anything they could do to solve one problem would only lead to other problems. This made for better stories and better action.
The legacy the master left behind has since been frequently copied, turned into a formula. So few directors have innovated upon it, though. It has so infrequently been re-imagined or reshaped, only repackaged. Of course, we always have Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window to go back to and watch again and again, but still, if only modern filmmakers took Alfie's imagination, and not just his tropes.
This film, in addition to some of the greatest action scenes in the history of cinema, also has one of the most explicit love scenes: A train going into a tunnel as the hero embraces the leading lady. It's as direct a metaphor as you could ask for. In fact, Hitchcock couldn't understand the appeal of the X rated films of the seventies since the idea of explicit sex scenes was old news to him!
If you haven't yet, see it. It remains startlingly relevant and exciting all these years later, and makes a perfect antidote to the big budget blockbusters that have the scale and scope of North by Northwest, but not the style. - 40724
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I haven't been a great fan of GraphicNovels, but this movie encouraged me to purchase a few ofthe Sin City books. Online Films Of course it will be a little trickier to try and locate the free stuff! "Stop thinking of yourself as playing "on" or "at" the piano.
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