North by Northwest (1959)

A Bloody Tomorrow

I am a huge fan of action movies. From classics like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon to the so-bad-they’re good movies like Con Air or any movie with Jean Claude Vam Damme in! From sci-fi action flicks like Aliens or Predator to adventure movies such as Raiders of the Lost Ark. From your secret agents Ethan Hunt and James Bond to policeman who don’t play by the rules but get results damn it such as Harry Callahan or Axel Foley. I love action. The chases, the shoot-outs, the combat and of course the cheesy one liners!

I also have a lot of spare time recently so I decided that it might be fun to try and watch every notable action movie in chronological order from the 60’s to the present day. Starting with your spy thrillers and spaghetti westerns of the 60’s to the gritty violence and Blaxploitation of the 70’s to the over-the-top one man armies of the 80’s, the explosive and silly thrills of the 90’s, the shaky cam mayhem of the 00’s ending with your Fury Roads, John Wick’s and the better-than-they-have-any-right-to-be straight to video releases of today.

I’ll also be dipping my toes into world cinema, especially Hong Kong movies of course, so I’ll be talking about the hard hitting Bruce Lee, the incredible stunts and comedy of Jackie Chan to John Woo’s heroic bloodshed classics. You might have guessed I am something of a John Woo superfan…

So join me in a journey through time with the best movies from Arnie, Sly, Willis, Gibson, Reeves, Lee, Li, Chan, Yeoh, Seagal, JCVD and Chuck Norris- a man so tough that when he does division there are no remainders.

I was going to start this list with the movies of Akira Kurosawa, especially Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo but I don’t actually own any of his movies with the exception of one, which we’ll get to much later. So instead I’ll start with the Alfred Hitchcock classic North by North West

North by Northwest (1959)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Starring: Cary Grant

Alfred Hitchcock takes you.... North by Northwest!

A waiter at a posh hotel asks out loud if a Mr George Caplan is in the room whilst at the same time Roger Thornhill beckons the same waiter over to send a telegram. Two thugs are also in the hotel searching for George Caplan and thus mistake the hapless Roger Thornhill as the man they are looking for and from this simple case of mistaken identity comes a thrilling cat and mouse chase through the United States.

Cary Grant is at his charming best as Roger Thornhill, the unfortunate victim of the mistaken identity, and he’s so naturally suave and charismatic that it’s not too hard to see why he’s mistaken to be a spy by the movies villain, the excellently named Phillip Vandamm. James Mason is a delight in the role “That’s not very sporting of you, using real bullets”, and his henchman Leonard is really well played too by Martin Landau who gives his character a subtle creepy menace throughout the film. Of course this being a Hitchcock movie you need a blonde female and this time the role was played by the excellent Eva Marie Saint who plays Clark Kent’s adopted mother in the new Superman movies. Perhaps best of all is Jessie Royce Landis playing Thornhill’s sarcastic Mother who has no time and tolerance for her son’s far-fetched stories about gangsters trying to murder him, even going so far as to outright ask the thugs in a crowded elevator “You’re not trying to kill my son are you?”

I’ll be straight up and say that I adore this film and it may be my second favourite Hitchcock movie behind the criminally underrated Dial M for Murder. It may be almost sixty years old but aside from some dodgy rear projection shots whenever the characters drive this movie still holds up and is a timeless classic. Okay so it’s more of a thriller than a straight up action movie, but it certainly does have its fair share of exciting moments including one of the greatest scenes ever filmed.

Ah yes that crop-duster scene. Hitchcock was known as the master of suspense and this is the perfect example to show why. Roger Thornhill has arranged to meet the mysterious George Caplan. We the audience know George Caplan doesn’t actually exist and that our hero is heading into a trap, something Thornhill isn’t yet privy too. Thornhill was told to take a bus and get off on a remote road in rural Indiana surrounded by nothing but farms. We have no dialogue or music for the next few minutes and aside from a crop-duster far away in the distance Thornhill is completely alone. Roger waits for Caplan to arrive and sees a car heading down the road, but the car doesn’t stop and drives right past. A second vehicle, this one coming from the other direction, is spotted but it too carries on going and then a minute or so later a truck does the same, covering Thornhill in dirt as it does so. Cary Grant dusts himself off and as the dust settles we aww a black car heading down a small slip road to the highway he is standing on.

A man in a hat gets out as the car drives back down the road it came from. Roger stares at the man and the guy looks back at him. Both stand still either side of the highway in almost a Mexican stand-off kind of way. Thornhill wonders to himself if this man is Caplan and we wonder if this man has been hired by Vandamm to kill him. It’s such a tense scene, but it turns out the man is guilty of nothing more than simply waiting for a bus. Thornhill and the man-who-isn’t-Caplan make awkward small talk about how crop-dusting is a lucrative career. As the bus pulls up the man points out that “the crop-duster is dusting crops where there aren’t no crops” before departing. Thornhill continues to wait, checking his watch to see what the time is wondering where Caplan is and we have a sense of dread that something bad is coming.

Then it happens. The crop-duster ever so slowly descends to ground aiming straight at Thornhill, who only avoids death by leaping out of the way at the last minute. Roger and the audience realise at the same time that this crop-duster is trying to kill him. What follows is a thrilling sequence where Thornhill tries to avoid the gunfire from the plane by hiding in the crops by the side of the road. Roger eventually tries to flag down an oil tanker for help when the plane collides with said tanker in a huge explosion. Other motorists pull up and get out to take a look at the fiery crash and then in one of my favourite action movie clichés (which obviously wasn’t a cliché yet when this film was made) our hero steals the vehicle of one of the shocked motorists who then gives chase shouting about his stolen car.

Altogether from the moment the Cary Grant gets off the bus to when the crop-duster attacks there are six minutes of mostly silent tension. You know an attack is coming but you have no idea where it’s coming from and even after the “dusting crops where there aren’t no crops” line you still don’t figure it out until it’s almost too late. I don’t think many other directors would be brave enough to show such restraint and let the scene play out for as long as it does, but it works wonderfully. The crop-duster attack and the six minutes prior to it are obviously the movies highlight but it’s not the only one by any means and here we also have an exciting end on Mount Rushmore which to my eyes still looks fantastically convincing today however they managed to film it. It would also be wrong not to mention the excellent score by Hitchcock regular Bernard Hemman or the famous opening titles by Saul Bass.

In many ways this movie, featuring a would-be spy (even though he’s actually not) travelling around the country on a train with a beautiful woman and trying to avoid death at the hands of a criminal organisation, feels like it could be James Bond 0. I don’t know if Hitchcock was at all influenced by Ian Flemming’s From Russia With Love but the movie of the same name would certainly be influenced by North by Northwest when it gets made a few years later. Hitchcock was even in the running to direct a James Bond movie at some point and he said that North by Northwest was effectively his Bond film.

Best quote: Now you listen to me, I'm an advertising man, not a red herring. I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself "slightly" killed.

Kick-ass moment: The aforementioned crop-duster scene

10/10. A cinema masterpiece.

Speaking of 007… Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow:

“I admire your courage Miss?”

“Trench. Sylvia Trench. And I admire your luck Mr?”

“Bond. James Bond.”