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North by Northwest (1959)
The man being hunted across America does not exist, which Hitchcock considered the entire point.

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The MacGuffin Perfected
An advertising executive raises his hand in a hotel lobby at the wrong moment and is mistaken for a government agent named George Kaplan. Kaplan is an empty suit in a wardrobe, a booking in a hotel register, an invention with no body, and everyone in the film is hunting or protecting a person who was never born. Hitchcock had been using this device for decades and here he built a whole picture out of it, on the principle that the audience does not care what is in the microfilm, only that somebody wants it badly. Ernest Lehman wrote it as, in his words, the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures, and the film moves from Madison Avenue to the United Nations to a cornfield in Indiana to the face of Mount Rushmore without ever slowing down to explain itself.

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[icon:CLOCK] Runtime | 136 minutes
[icon:STAR] Director | Alfred Hitchcock
[icon:CHART] Budget | $4.3 million
[icon:TRENDING_UP] Box office | $9.8 million worldwide
[icon:FIRE] Cinematography | Robert Burks

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Watching North by Northwest
3 Mistaken
4 Framed
4 Accused
5 Strafed
4 Bidding
5 Clinging

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Roger Thornhill · North by Northwest · 1959]
In the world of advertising there's no such thing as a lie. There's only the expedient exaggeration.

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The National Park Service objected to a chase over Mount Rushmore, so most of it was shot on a scale model and a plaster mountain at MGM, with the faces built to size on stage.

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Bernard Herrmann scored the whole film as a fandango, a dance in three time, which is why a spy thriller feels like it is constantly circling back on itself.

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Every subsequent spy film owes this one its shape: the ordinary man mistaken for a professional, the beautiful stranger with divided loyalties, the set piece staged at a landmark. The Bond series copied the template almost item by item from 1962 onward, and Hitchcock had already made the joke explicit by ending on a train entering a tunnel. It is his lightest major film and the one that proves suspense has nothing to do with stakes.

:LINK
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/
North by Northwest on IMDb: full cast and crew