Community Screening: North By Northwest
September 20, 2026
Community Screenings
Cary Grant stars as an innocent man mistaken for a spy in one of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest thrillers. While leaving New York's Plaza Hotel, advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Grant) has the misfortune of standing just as the name "George Kaplan" is paged--starting a lethal case of mistaken identity and a nonstop game of cat and mouse as he is pursued across North America by espionage agents trying to kill him--and by police who suspect him of murder.
“Crop dustin’ where there ain’t no crops,” the Mount Rushmore duel, the train going into the tunnel. Classic Hitchcock set-pieces just keep coming as Cary Grant’s Roger O. Thornhill (initials ROT) finds a simple case of mistaken identity snowballing into a breakneck chase across the country, menaced by James Mason and his goon squad, and aided, teased, and thwarted by Eva Marie Saint’s double (or triple?) agent. “Hitchcock’s sleek, wry, paranoid thriller caught the ’50s zeitgeist perfectly: Cold War shadiness, secret agents of power, urbane modernism, the ant like bustle of city life, and a hint of dread behind the sharp suits of affluence.” – Time Out
- Director: Alfred Hitchcock
- Principal Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau
- Country: USA
- Year: 1959
- Running Time: 136
- Screenplay: Ernest Lehman
- Cinematographers: Robert Burks
- Editors: George Tomasini
- Music: Bernard Herrmann
- US Distributor: Warner Brothers
