Alfred Hitchcock's continental-scale chase film. Cary Grant, a crop-duster on a Midwestern road, and the Mount Rushmore climax that almost every subsequent chase has been quoting.
New York, 1959. Roger O. Thornhill, a Madison Avenue advertising executive, is mistakenly identified as a CIA agent named George Kaplan by foreign agents working for a spy named Phillip Vandamm. Thornhill is kidnapped, nearly killed, and finds himself accused of a murder committed by the agents while he was a hostage. He flees New York to Chicago in pursuit of the actual Kaplan, hoping to clear his name. The CIA, watching from the periphery, has its own interests.
The film tracks Thornhill across the United States from Manhattan to Chicago to Mount Rushmore over approximately five days. Along the way he encounters Eve Kendall, a young woman who may be a CIA agent, may be Vandamm's mistress, may be both. The film's climactic sequence on the faces of Mount Rushmore is one of the most-quoted action set pieces in classical Hollywood cinema.
Ernest Lehman's screenplay for North by Northwest is, by general critical consensus among working screenwriters, one of the foundational chase-thriller scripts of classical Hollywood cinema. The script's working principle — articulated by Hitchcock to Lehman during development — was 'the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.' Lehman set out to construct a film that would include every Hitchcock trope at maximum scale: the wrongly-accused protagonist, the cool blonde, the cross-country pursuit, the iconic set-piece on a landmark.
The screenplay is, in retrospect, among the cleanest examples of mainstream-thriller construction in the period. Each act delivers a specific set piece. Each set piece advances the protagonist's understanding by exactly enough information to drive him into the next sequence. The dialogue is unusually witty for the genre. The screenplay was nominated for Best Original Screenplay; it lost to Pillow Talk in one of the more-debated 1960 Academy decisions.
The Indiana cornfield crop-duster sequence — Thornhill standing alone at a Midwestern bus stop on an empty road, a small plane appearing in the distance and progressively revealing itself as an attempt on his life — is, by general critical consensus, one of the foundational suspense sequences in mainstream cinema. The sequence runs approximately seven minutes. It begins with Thornhill simply standing on the side of the road; the plane's progressive approach builds the dread without dialogue, score, or any visible threat the audience can initially identify.
Hitchcock has described the structural choice across multiple interviews. The sequence's setting was deliberately the opposite of conventional suspense territory — bright daylight, open countryside, no architectural elements to provide hiding places, no apparent threat. The suspense had to be constructed entirely from the audience's anticipation rather than from any visible danger. The technique has been imitated extensively but rarely matched.
The film's climactic sequence on Mount Rushmore was shot partly on location and partly on a studio recreation of the monument. The U.S. National Park Service refused to allow the production to film fight choreography on the actual presidents' faces; the climactic action was performed on a 60-foot-tall plaster recreation built on a sound stage. The integration of location footage and studio footage is, on close inspection, occasionally visible; the suspension of disbelief required for the sequence to work is part of the audience's pleasure.
The sequence has been cited by almost every subsequent landmark-finale action film. The James Bond series's frequent landmark climaxes (the Statue of Liberty in A View to a Kill, the Hoover Dam in Goldfinger) are direct citations. Almost every Mission: Impossible final sequence is in conversation with the Mount Rushmore climax. The structural decision — to stage the film's final action on a recognisable American landmark whose iconography the audience already understands — has been the model for blockbuster action endings for sixty-five years.