Kickass, hardcore birdwatchers.
The Birds sucked!
- Thread starter Alidar Jarok
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North by Northwest is fun. It's intentionally a bit over-the-top. It was Hitchcock out-Hitchcocking himself.
As for the coy banter between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, it's typical of the Hitchcockian romantic-chase-adventure genre. Universal seemed to specialize in those films in the 1960s -- there was Arabesque with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, House of Cards with George Peppard and Inger Stevens, and, of course, Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn -- probably the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never made.
Shameful!
I don't know, I think most of that film is intentionally tongue in cheek. If there's anything I don't like about it, it is neither of those things, but the quick cut from Grant and Saint hanging off of Mt. Rushmore to them married on the train.
I love The Birds. It's a great film and my favorite of the Hitchcock movies I've seen (although to this date I've never seen Psycho).
being very old i remember when hitchcok was on carson and said he regretted he couldnt do the ending he really wanted.
ie the golden gate bridge covered with birds.
he would have loved cgi.
this might be of interest.
dumaurier reacts to the film
ie the golden gate bridge covered with birds.
he would have loved cgi.
this might be of interest.
dumaurier reacts to the film
Indeed. You're supposed to laugh and have fun with how ridiculous that scene's dialogue is. Hitch was basically remaking his own 39 Steps, and, having already done a serious, more realistically-written version of that story, was more or less just having fun.
I took a Hitchcock course in college, and my prof argued that the suddenness of that cut, alongside the poorly synced Cary Grant line, was Hitch's way of ever so subtly suggesting that the train (and implied rescue) ending was only a wild fantasy of Thornhill's, and that they probably both fell to their deaths. Not to be too macabre, but I kinda like the idea myself...
That's Hitchcock again; he's not a man for codas. When it's over, it's over (and besides, having them married on the train allows him to end with a train entering a tunnel, which is IN NO WAY
suggestive of anything at all.)
I took a Hitchcock course in college, and my prof argued that the suddenness of that cut, alongside the poorly synced Cary Grant line, was Hitch's way of ever so subtly suggesting that the train (and implied rescue) ending was only a wild fantasy of Thornhill's, and that they probably both fell to their deaths. Not to be too macabre, but I kinda like the idea myself...
I don't know. I mean, the entire movie sounds and acts quite a lot like the wild fantasy life of an extremely dull businessman, which is what Roger Thornhill is when he isn't saving the secrets of the United States from foreign powers. One moment he's going through banal crap with his secretary; a misstimed reaction to a phonecall from his mother (sigh, still having to put up with her are we?) and he's in a fabulous world of spies and counter-spies, high stakes suspense and impossibly gorgeous blondes... a world he moves through with a surprising degree of confidence and aplomb. If North by Northwest is a fantasy, then the whole thing is; and anyway of course it is; I'm of a mind Hitchcock casts his protagonist like that so the audience can relate to him and vicariously life his sudden fantasy success through him. He's just one more face of Hitchcock's unending parade of the wrong men; ordinary folk in the wrong place at the wrong time who make the best of it anyhow.
Anyway, I'd go ahead and say North by Northwest is by far one of the greatest James Bond movies ever made. That it's not actually about James Bond is immaterial.
And speaking of James Bond - and The Birds - let's see a little love for Marnie, the Hitchcockian pschyodrama starring Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren. That's also another one of his classics and I am often frankly of a mind that it's a trifle underrated.
I've never been a huge fan of The Birds, but even I can't deny how beautifully it creates a sense of doom, of something on the horizon far more savage and terrible than even those birds show us throughout the film. I also love the ending and Suzanne Pleschette.
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