North by Northwest

North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred Hitchcock's spy thriller you can watch online on iFILM. An ad executive is mistaken for a secret agent, and an ordinary man finds himself running across the country from people he has never met.

Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) orders a drink in a Manhattan hotel and minutes later is bundled into a car by armed men who keep calling him Kaplan. Things only get worse. He is framed for a killing at the United Nations, his face hits the front pages, and the law closes in. On a train he meets the cool, evasive Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), whose loyalties refuse to stay still. Pulling the strings is the silken villain Vandamm, played by James Mason, with a young Martin Landau among his men.

Ernest Lehman's screenplay gave cinema two images that filmmakers have borrowed ever since: the crop-duster bearing down on a lone man in open farmland, and the cliffhanger across the carved faces of Mount Rushmore. Bernard Herrmann's restless score keeps the chase moving without a breath of slack. Critics often call it the blueprint for the innocent-man-on-the-run genre, the template Bond and countless others would follow. Stream North by Northwest (1959) online on iFILM.