North by Northwest is a 1959 American thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason. The screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures". It is a tale of mistaken identity. An innocent man is pursued across the United States by agents of a mysterious organization who want to stop his interference in their plans to smuggle out microfilm containing government secrets. Author and journalist Nick Clooney praised Lehman's original story and sophisticated dialogue, calling the film, "certainly Alfred Hitchcock's most stylish thriller, if not his best".
North by Northwest was nominated for three Academy Awards for Film Editing, Art Direction, and Original Screenplay. All three Oscars went instead to Ben-Hur. The movie review site Rotten Tomatoes said the film was "gripping, suspenseful and visually iconic" and claims it "laid the groundwork for countless action thrillers to follow." In June 2008, the American Film Institute said North by Northwest was the seventh best film in the mystery genre. Fifty years after its release, "Time" magazine said it was still a great movie today, saying "there's nothing dated about this perfect storm of talent" and that the "opening-credits sequence still manages to send a shiver down the spine."
