North by Northwest on 70mm

Hitchcock brought the wrong-man espionage thriller into a new era with this stylish, brilliantly self-parodic chase across late-1950s America, where spies and Cold War anxieties now operate under corporate polish and Bergdorf Goodman. Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, a Madison Avenue man who looks to have been born wearing a suit, is mistaken for George Kaplan, a secret agent who doesn’t even exist, then chased from Manhattan to Mount Rushmore by James Mason’s silky smuggler Vandamm and Eva Marie Saint’s coolly unreadable Eve Kendall (who Hitchcock notably styled from pre-selected mannequin outfits). The ostensible conspiracy involves microfilm and Soviet agents in all but name, but Hitchcock’s decision to make Thornhill an advertising man gives this misrecognition road-movie-farce a far more stinging message about freedom from choice in the U.S. Mistaken by criminals, dismissed by police, framed in the press, maneuvered by his own government, and even mocked by his own mother, Thornhill survives an entire country built from masks and slogans only by learning to play the role written for him.

Filmed in 35mm VistaVision by Robert Burks and released in 1.85. Motion Picture Imaging scanned the original 8-perf 35mm VistaVision camera negative in 13K with all restoration work completed in 6.5K. The 70mm film print screening in this program was created in 2024 by filming out a new 65mm negative. The Film Foundation has given approval of the restoration.