Often listed among the greatest films of all time, North by Northwest (1959), an American spy thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is also regarded as one of the most entertaining and fast-paced suspense thrillers, created by the master director. The glamorous espionage thriller is a tale of mistaken identity, and at the same time a hazardous adventure of a complacent man, a successful advertising executive, named Roger Thornhill, suddenly caught up in a series of unwanted events, played by Cary Grant, his fourth and last collaboration with the director.

Unexpectedly, to the surprise of the studio and Cary Grant, Hitchcock also selected Oscar-winning Eva Marie Saint to play the role of Eve Kendall, the vivacious icy blonde heroine of the film. The film was critically hailed both by The New Yorker and The New York Times after its first screening and much later, in 1995, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library Congress, USA.

North by Northwest, directed my Alfred Hitchcock, starts with the kidnapping scene of Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive, in broad daylight while he was having lunch at the Oak Room restaurant in Plaza Hotel, mistaken for another man, George Kaplan. To his utter surprise, Roger was driven in a Cadillac limousine and brought to the estate of Lester Townsend in Glen Cove on the North Shore of Long Island, where he was interrogated by Phillip Vandamm, a Cold War spy against the United States, impersonating Townsend, demanding certain information from him. Although totally bewildered, Roger vehemently and repeatedly denied that he is Kaplan, and finally produced his identification cards, driver's license to prove his actual identity, which made Philip Vandamm and his henchman Leonard dejected, and they hatched a plan to eliminate Roger.

He was forced to get drunk with a bottle of bourbon taken out from the liquor cabinet and take the driver's seat of a Mercedes roadster convertible, expecting him to be the victim of a fatal, drunk-driving accident on the dark winding ocean cliff road.

As luck would have it, Roger did not die, but was arrested by police for his erratic driving. However, when it was discovered at the Glen Cove Police Station that he was driving a stolen vehicle, the police refused to believe his story of abduction, charging him for driving a stolen car while he was totally intoxicated. But next morning when Roger was produced in the court, the judge turned over the case to the county detectives for further investigation in the matter, and the investigators in their turn took him to the Townsend mansion to check out his incredulous story.

During the revisit, Roger learns that Townsend is a United Nations diplomat, but to his complete bewilderment he found that all the evidences of his earlier visit have been disappeared from the scene, there are no liquor bottles in the cabinet, as he had earlier mentioned to the police, even the liquor stains have been removed from the couch. Moreover, a lady in the house, supposed to be Mrs Townsend, greeted him as Mr Kalpan like an old acquaintance, mildly chided him for having had too much to drink at the dinner party, even divulged that he called a cab to go back to New York.

After that, Roger persuaded his mother to accompany him to visit the Plaza Hotel in his desperate attempt to learn anything about the mysterious Mr Kalpan. Once in the hotel, he came to know that although Kaplan has booked a room no 796 in the hotel, it has not been used for two days. Up in the hallway outside Kaplan's room, a hotel maid mistook him as Kalpan, the occupant of the room, but it became evident from his subsequent conversation with the maid and the valet that neither of them has ever seen Kaplan. The room of Kalpan was empty, but there Roger received a call from the lobby, once again affirming his identity as Mr. Kaplan. Apprehending some imminent danger, he rushed out with his mother to take the elevator to the lobby, only to find two persons in the crowd whom he met the night before. As soon as the elevator reaches the ground floor, Roger hurriedly got into a cab, asking the driver to take him to the General Assembly building of the United Nations to talk to the owner of the estate of Lester Townsend.

When Roger met Lester Townsend in the public lounge of the UN building, he discovered that he was facing a different Mr Townsend, not the man he had seen before in Glen Cove. He was also informed by Lester Townsend that currently the Glen Cove estate is empty, because for the last month he is staying in an apartment in Manhattan, and the woman he met in the palatial building was not Mrs Townsend, because she died many years ago. During their discussion, a second assassination attempt on Roger failed, when a knife thrown by one of his pursuers missed the target, stabbed Townsend in the back and he collapsed in Roger's arms. As he pulled the knife out of Townsend's back, Roger is photographed holding the knife in the mid-air, implicating that he has killed the diplomat. In panic and dilemma, he tosses the knife away and rushes out of the hall, got into a cab and flees, determined to find the real Kaplan to clear himself of a murder for which he was not responsible. Unfortunately for him, the United States Intelligence Agency was aware of the situation and knew that Roger has been mistaken for Kaplan, an imaginary and a non-existent agent they created to confuse and mislead the foreign spies like Vandamm, but their chief, known as the Professor, decided against rescuing him for fear of compromising their operation.

While abroad a train to Chicago, Roger meets the icy blonde Eve Kendall, who shelters him in her cabin from being captured by the police and they fell for each other. In Chicago, she informs Roger that she has arranged for him a meeting with Kaplan at a rural bus stop in the middle of flat countryside. But once there, he soon discovers that he has been lured into a trap, as a crop duster biplane suddenly attacks him. Desperately, he takes cover in a cornfield, then attempts to halt a tank truck; which brakes, and the plane crashes into it, and finally he escapes by stealing a pickup van during the aftermath of the ensuing explosion.

After returning Chicago, Roger trails Eve Kendall to find her in an auction house with her supposed lover, Vandamm, the fake Townsend, along with his henchman Leonard, purchasing a Mexican statue. Roger intended to go out of the auction house, only to find all of the exits are covered by Vandamm's henchmen. He then tries to take a chance to create confusion by bidding an enormous sum for an antique, which provokes a fight, and he is finally arrested by summoned police, and taken to the Midway Airport. At the airport, he met the Professor of Intelligence Agency, who informs him that Kaplan is an imaginary and a non-existent agent created by the Agency to confuse Vandamm, while Kendall is actually an agent working for him, assigned to find out Vandamm’s modus operandi of smuggling the secret information out of the country. At the request of the Professor, Roger agreed to play the role of Kalpan to solidify Kendall’s cover and trail Vandamm and Kendall to Rapid City, South Dakota where Phillip Vandamm has a mountaintop retreat.

The next day, pretending as Agent Kalpan, Roger faced Phillip Vandamm and Eve Kendall in a crowded restaurant at the Mount Rushmore Memorial, and informs Vandamm that he is aware of his plan to leave the country that night, but it will be a failure, unless he turns Eve over to him. But when Vandamm hotly refused to accept his proposal, and Roger grabs Eve and pulls her towards him, Eve Kendall immediately pulls a gun from her bag and fires two shots at Roger, only to assure Vandamm that she is genuinely on his side. Roger, seemingly wounded, collapses and is quickly attended by Professor, who has him taken away by ambulance that heads deep into the woods where Roger meets Eve and expresses his love for her, and wants to marry her. It is obvious that the shooting was a ruse and the bullets were blanks, only to fool Vandamm and to convince him that Eve was loyal to him. However later, when Roger secretly visits Vandamm’s house, he overhears a conversation that makes it clear that Vandamm and his men have come to know that Kendall is working for the Professor of the Intelligence Agency, that Leonard has discovered the blanks in Kendall's gun, Vandamm will kill Kendall by throwing her from the plane, and the Mexican statue, which Vandamm purchased from the auction house holds secret microfilm.

Roger immediately felt the urgent necessity to warn Eve about the imminent danger and scribbles a note on one of his ROT monogrammed matchbooks and drops it down to the living room near her seat. Later, when Vandamm and Leonard depart the house along with Eve for the waiting plane on the concealed landing strip behind the building, Roger is discovered by the housekeeper and held at gunpoint, until he realises the gun is the one with blanks, and then drives madly to the waiting plane. Eve was frequently turning back with the expectation of being rescued by Roger, and as soon as she found Roger’s rushing car, she bolts herself free from Vandamm, snatched the statue containing microfilm and jumped into Roger’s car. However, soon they found their way blocked by a huge gate, and headed off on foot to find themselves on the Mount Rushmore, surrounded by the thugs. As there was no other way, and everything looked grim, they began to climb down the massive monument, but ultimately, Professor and his agents arrived in time to save the day. After that, the film ends with the scene, Roger and Eve are on board a train, heading away on their honeymoon trip.

North by Northwest, described by a viewer as a beautiful combination of art and commerce in a delicious salad with all the right ingredients, and widely regarded as the classic Hitchcock film, opened on the 1st day of July 1959, at the United Artists Theatre in Chicago, grossed $46,000 in its first week and $35,000 the second week. In the film, Carry Grant gave a typically charismatic performance in the role of a handsome advertising executive, while Eva Marie Saint perfectly matched the role of Hitchcock’s quintessential cool icy blond with a brain and James Mason earns praise as the bad man Philip Vandamm. However, the film was nominated for three Academy Awards, but won none.