The Hitchcock film to end all Hitchcock films, North by Northwest was released 65 years ago in July. You know the story: Cary Grant is a Madison Avenue adman who gets inadvertently caught up in a world of espionage. The film’s frantic pace slows to an undulating rhythm when he meets Eva Marie Saint on a Chicago-bound 20th Century Limited. Of all Hitchcock’s blondes, Saint is the most self-possessed. Tipping the steward to seat Grant at her dining-car table, she quickly gets to the point: “It’s going to be a long night. And I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started. You know what I mean?” The rest of the movie’s dazzling set pieces sometimes feel like Hitchcock mischievously inventing ways to keep them apart until the finale, which finds the pair once again on a train—now on honeymoon—as it rushes suggestively through a tunnel. Saint also celebrated another milestone in July: her 100th birthday.
