North By North West Evaluation

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 an 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 many reasons. One main reason was because it was in color; not a lot of films were in color 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.

The Blurb
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, tension 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 [spoiler] where he had to start a fight to prevent the villains from getting to him. 
 
"Thrillers are characterized by fast pacing, frequent action." This is shown in the scene where the villains get Thornhill drunk and put him in a car which they almost succeed in driving him of of a cliff, but then it turns into a chase. Also, there is a famous scene where Thornhill is getting chased by a crop duster and we have no idea how he will escape from it.This is also an ionic scene for it had good quality special effects, which isn't very common in movies in those days. Also, it was a great thriller scene and it got the audience's heart's racing and the tension and suspense was building on whether Thornhill was going to escape alive or not.

 "Resourceful heroes who must thwart the plans of more powerful and better equipped villains," is shown in North by North West for the hero, Thornhill, is just an average guy. He was mistaken for a government agent and so he had no power over anything that happened.

There was a Red Herring in this movie for we all thought that the woman, Eve, was a villain, for she was working with the bad guys and she set Thornhill up. However, we later on find out that she is actually a government spy and she was working against the villains all along. That is the red herring.
There is also a cliffhanger 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.
 
"A thriller is a villain driven plot, whereby he presents obstacles the hero must overcome." This is shown in the film by the use of a MacGuffin, which is where the villain has an immense interest in something that the audience doesn't care about. In North By North West, the MacGuffin is the Microchip, and the villains would sacrifice anything to get that microchip and smuggle it out of the country.

Hitchcock said 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 his life changed; he was suddenly a murderer, a convict, a criminal. Nobody wants that to happen, and so that is a nightmare. Hitchcock explains that if he 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.