YMMV / North by Northwest

• Award Snub: Went 0 for 3 at the Academy Awards. Editing and Art Direction lost to Ben-Hur, while Original Screenplay lost to Pillow Talk. Amazingly, it was editor George Tomasini's only Oscar nomination, while it was the second of five screenplay losses for Ernest Lehman (who finally got a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2000). It also wasn't nominated for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor or Score.
• Crazy Is Cool: Vandamm. The guy went as far as sending a crop duster to try to kill Thornhill when he could have just shot him.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: As with most Hitchcock films, it's been subject to this. There's talk of Roger as a Messianic Archetype (Thornhill=Jesus wore a crown of thorns on a hill), Eve and how her name symbolizes temptation and femininity, and a villain who has the word "damn" (well, "damm") in his name.
• Evil Is Cool: Phillip Vandamm for being a charismatic, faux affable, yet skilled mastermind who proves numerous times to be a serious threat to Thornhill and the spies.
• Genius Bonus: Roger calling the statue with the microfilm in it "the pumpkin" seems like a Non Sequitur, unless you're familiar with the Alger Hiss case, which hinged on the discovery of microfilm that Hiss had given to his former colleague Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had kept the film inside a hollowed-out pumpkin in a pumpkin patch on his farm. It was still a current-enough reference in 1959 that most of the audience would've gotten the joke.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: So... a suave, witty advertising exec who's been through divorces, a Chick Magnet and fond of drinking. Great at good at manipulating the public, while not being who everyone thinks he is. Are we talking about Roger Thornhill or Don Draper?
• Just Here for Godzilla: Who came just to watch the cropduster scene?
• Magnificent Bastard: The Professor is the head of a mysterious government agency, who masterminds the plot of "George Kaplan" to take down enemies of America. The Professor created the fictitious spy George Kaplan to throw off villainous Phillip Vandamm from the true spy in his ranks, Eve Kendall, who the Professor turned years ago and had been using as a mole. Masterfully making Kaplan out to be real with hotel rentals and plane flights, the Professor is delighted when accountant Roger Thornhill is framed as Kaplan, willing to let him die due to false identity to continue the cover up. The Professor ends up turning Thornhill into an asset, faking his death right in front of Vandamm, and then saves the day at the end by arriving in the nick of time with police to capture or kill all of Vandamm's associates after Thornhill and Eve expose them.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Vandamm crosses it early on when he refuses to listen to Thornhill insisting that he is not the man Vandamm thinks he is and decides to simply kill him despite his protests, as if implying that whether Thornhill is telling the truth or not, it makes no difference to him.
  • Leonard crosses it in the climax when he steps on Thornhill's hand, the one he's holding precariously on to the cliff by (Eve is holding on to his other hand), after Thornhill asks him for help. A Karmic Death follows moments later.
• Once Original, Now Common: A viewer who has never seen the film before can recognize trope after trope, perhaps unaware that it was a defining film in action genre and that films like James Bond and Indiana Jones were heavily influenced by it.
• Poor Man's Substitute: Eva Marie Saint for Grace Kelly as the classic Hitchcockian blonde.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Thornhill's lawyer is the Chief of CONTROL.
  • Martin Landau is Leonard.
  • The Professor is Alexander Waverly.
  • Sgt. Emile Klinger was played by John Beradino, a few years before starting his long General Hospital tenure as Dr. Steve Hardy.
• Signature Scene: Two words—crop duster. Not just the Signature Scene of this film, but arguably the Signature Scene of Hitchcock's whole career (the Psycho shower scene is the other possibility).
  • It Was His Sled: The cropduster scene, like the shower scene, became famous because it was so shocking and unexpected when the film was first released. Thanks to Pop-Cultural Osmosis, anyone who's heard of this film knows about that scene, even if they've never seen it.
• Spiritual Adaptation: James Bond was already a popular book series when this film came out, but it still essentially codified many of the elements that typify Bond: morally ambiguous Femme Fatale spies, Affably Evil supervillains, sexually ambiguous dragons, use of Monumental Battle and wild action sequences. Likewise, Sean Connery's turn as Bond, as a more suave individual than his literary counterpart, was based on Cary Grant's performance in this film. Indeed, Hitchcock, who at one point was approached by Ian Fleming about adapting Bond to the screen, was later upset that producer Albert Broccoli (whom he knew personally) ripped off his film for many of the early Bond films.
• Spiritual Successor: To previous Hitchcock films such as The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, The Wrong Man, and Saboteur.
• Values Dissonance: Roger's penalty for drunk driving is a small fine, compared to today where such a crime would entail much more severe consequences such as a suspended drivers license, much larger fines, community service, and/or jail time.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: It's acquired the reputation of being Hitchcock's most family-friendly classic, probably because it's in color, has a good blend of action and comedy, doesn't focus on a murder (like Rear Window) and doesn't delve into complex psychological themes (like Vertigo). Of course, it also has several scenes where people are stabbed or shot at, clear insinuations that Roger and Eve had sex on the train, and a rather intense ending. It was featured on the Turner Classic Movies program Essentials Jr., which is marketed towards families and younger viewers, and usually features softer fare. There's also at least one DVD that carries the rating "all ages" without any warnings. This even goes back to when it was released: Movie theaters reportedly gave children coloring pages of such scenes as Roger getting chased by the crop duster and Eve hanging off of Mount Rushmore.

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