I still get tingles up my spine on hearing Bernard Herrmann's electrifying score and Saul Bass' stunning opening titles design, and other things help this vault the years: Cary Grant at his charming best playing a Don Draper type (so expert at taking on board liquor that when the baddies try to get him so drunk he drives off a cliff he can actually take it); the beauty of Eva Marie Saint (part of me still wishes they have Grace Kelly but I'm used to Saint now); the superb villainy of James Mason and Martin Landau; the masterful sets of the United Nations, Mount Rushmore, etc; the famous crop duster attack; that stupendous house at Mount Rushmore; Leo G. Carroll's lively spy chief.
Ernest Lehmann's screenplay is enormously clever and witty, with some great dialogue (the Grant-Saint sex exchanges are deservedly famous but my favourite is Mason's final line "that's rather unsporting of you, shooting with real bullets"), and tremendous structure: notice how every fifteen minutes or so there's a new big twist (eg Grant's wanted for murder, there is no agent, Saint is in cahoots with Mason, Saint falls in love).
If I'm being nitpicking - and I've seen this movie so often I think I can claim the right - the movie is too long. It clocks at two hours 20 minutes and really at least 20 could have been trimmed by removing repeated dialogue and unnecessary bits. Also the tension is lessened once Grant is caught by the police and we know he's not going to be captured by them. Some of the back projection and effects haven't aged well; some of the camera angles are likely to induce laughter.
But it's funny, witty and sexy and it's great that when Hitchcock finally made a movie for MGM it was such a glamorous, sophisticated one. Louis B Mayer would have approved, if not of all the sex.
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