Der unsichtbare Dritte (1959)

North by Northwest is the central film in what many fans consider to be Alfred Hitchcock's holy
trinity of films, starting with Vertigo and completing with Psycho. For many, it's the
quintessential Hitchcock film: wry and funny, suspenseful, adventurous, romantic, and filled
with danger, intrigue and mistaken identities. Most of all, it's two and a quarter hours of
dynamite entertainment.
It stars Cary Grant at his most affable and charming as Roger Thornhill, an advertising
executive who, by one harmless gesture, ends up in the hands of Vandamm (Mason), a master of
international espionage. Vandamm thinks that Thornhill is George Kaplan, an American
government agent on his trail. When Kaplan…that is to say, Thornhill cannot cooperate,
Vandamm tries to have him killed by pouring a bottle of bourbon into him and setting him out on
the road!
Thornhill survives, but finds no evidence the next day to support his desperate claims of
kidnapping and attempted murder, meaning his only chance to clear his name is to find the
people who did it to him. A daunting task, to be sure, but it's made even more difficult when
Thornhill becomes framed for a murder at the United Nations!
With his picture in newspapers from coast to coast, Thornhill goes on the lam, but ends up in
the company of a sultry, mysterious train passenger named Eve Kendall (the alluring Saint).
He's not quite sure why she's willing to help him, and neither are we…until we have reason to
believe she's one of Vandamm's operatives. Will Thornhill find a way to save his own hide,
finger the bad guys, and end up with the girl? Hey…this is Cary Grant we're talking about!
Hitchcock's favorite "mistaken man" plot has never been crafted so smartly and entertainingly
before, thanks to a keen screenplay by Ernest Lehman and Hitch's own uncanny sense of pacing
and rhythm. Case in point is the famous sequence where Thornhill goes to meet Kaplan on a hot,
dusty, empty crossroads.
He stands and waits. A car come up, and goes by, and then another. A truck does the same. A
car pulls up and stops, and a man gets out, while the car goes on its way. The two men stare
at one another. Thornhill approaches. It's not the right man…he's just a guy waiting for a
bus. The man looks off at a distant plane and casually remarks that the plane is dusting crops
where there ain't no crops. He gets on the bus. Thornhill is alone again, except for that plane…
And the rest, is of course, history. It's a brilliant piece of filmmaking in which Hitchcock
knows just how long to toy with us before delivering the action packed finale. When the chase
begins, the effect is even more thrilling because of how long we sat in anticipation without
anything happening.
The second major signature piece is the finale where Roger and Eve are chased across the face
of Mount Rushmore by the bad guys. It's a skillful blend of actual location shooting and
carefully reproduced interior sets to give the illusion that our heroes' lives are always a
footstep away from ending.
Though it's impossible for any group of fans to agree on which of Hitchcock's many indelible
films constitutes his greatest works, North by Northwest is always one that gets brought up.
Almost 50 years after its release, it remains a classic and a favorite amongst Hitch's
devotees, and quite possibly the most perfect of his movies to use in introducing a newbie to
the films of Hitchcock.
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