North by Northwest

As I said yesterday, I already watched one of the movies on my list!  After I made the list, I just so happened to be scrolling through Turner Classic Movies for the weekend and saw that North by Northwest was on Friday.  I taped it and watched it on New Year's Day morning.  It was cold and gray and rainy and the Beans and I snuggled up on the couch with some good coffee and watched it.

Oh, my.  It was so good!

Here's what Amazon has to say about it:

A strong candidate for the most sheerly entertaining and enjoyable movie ever made by a Hollywood studio (with Citizen Kane, Only Angels Have Wings and Trouble in Paradise running neck and neck). Positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo (1958) and the stark horror of Psycho (1960), North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred Hitchcock at his most effervescent in a romantic comedy-thriller that also features one of the definitive Cary Grant performances. Which is not to say that this is just "Hitchcock Lite"; seminal Hitchcock critic Robin Wood (in his book Hitchcock's Films Revisited) makes an airtight case for this glossy MGM production as one of The Master's "unbroken series of masterpieces from Vertigo to Marnie." It's a classic Hitchcock Wrong Man scenario: Grant is Roger O. Thornhill (initials ROT), an advertising executive who is mistaken by enemy spies for a U.S. undercover agent named George Kaplan. Convinced these sinister fellows (James Mason as the boss, and Martin Landau as his henchman) are trying to kill him, Roger flees and meets a sexy Stranger on a Train (Eva Marie Saint), with whom he engages in one of the longest, most convolutedly choreographed kisses in screen history. And, of course, there are the famous set pieces: the stabbing at the United Nations, the crop-duster plane attack in the cornfield (where a pedestrian has no place to hide), and the cliffhanger finale atop the stone faces of Mount Rushmore. Plus a sparkling Ernest Lehman script and that pulse-quickening Bernard Herrmann score. What more could a moviegoer possibly desire?--Jim Emerson

I say that I was entertained from start to finish.  Cary Grant was never sexier, Eva Marie Saint was gorgeous (her clothes were to die for) and it was just chock full of midcentury modern decor porn. 

I ended up kicking myself.  Why have I never watched this before?

Now I think I need to buy the DVD.