North by Northwest lacks Vertigo’s deliriously unhinged inner excavations, or Psycho’s id, or The Birds’ nihilistic opacity, or Rear Window’s playful self-contemplation, but it may be as wry and wiry as Alfred Hitchcock ever got. In inching toward the sleek, aloof, maximalist delights of high-gloss, haute-couture 1960s pictures, North by Northwest isn’t necessarily nervier than it otherwise would be, but it certainly does provide an impish new spin on Hitchcock’s wickedly self-amused sense of self. It’s superficially glossy feel somehow makes its observations all the thornier, like a razor wrapped in cotton candy. That Hitchcock’s most overtly pleasurable film so smoothly and surreptitiously smuggles in so many minuscule wrinkles and devious intimations that all is not right with America may even be a surer display of his astringent talents. Figured as a grand confidence act at the end of the 1950s, it feels like the last time Hitch could celebrate the delirious excesses of modernity, and pungently dissect his own complicity in it, before Psycho and The Birds took him into the cloacal core of terror and abjection respectively. It’s far from Hitchcock’s cruelest film, but something about its chipper demeanor feels uniquely nasty nonetheless.

For North by Northwest is very much a sly deconstruction of America, one that practically announces itself with its famous final set piece, a suggestion that America’s national monument, and its pretensions of greatness, is really just a home base for conniving and cheating one another. Climaxing atop Mt. Rushmore, Hitchcock’s hilarious planned Lincoln-nose sneezing gag never came to fruition, but there is something amusing about the censors only allowing advertisement executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) to slide around between the faces rather than on them, as though the film is playing around in the crevices and shadows of American monumentality but never quite getting to the core of the matter, either because America is too dense to really know or too shallow to be worthy of exploration. Atop an edifice of stone, a monument of national lies and hubris, we find only a slippery conspiracy of ne’er do wells that runs on battery acid. North by Northwest is the ur-film, the apotheosis of Classical Hollywood, a cinematic snake oil salesman that sells us on itself even as it tells us what kind of poison we’re about to drink.

Between the Mt. Rushmore finale and the crop duster – America’s mid-century farm land  – and the train trip –  technology phallically penetrating the land, a joke infamously concluded in the film’s final shot  –  and the planned scene at the Detroit auto factory, North by Northwest is practically Hitch’s deconstruction of American iconography writ large. And, in the United Nations opening when a murder happens like a handshake in front of thousands, this is Hitchcock’s shiv into the pretensions of mid-century internationalism. The film doesn’t elaborate on that last part, but that’s part of the fun. With all these stopovers, North by Northwest is neither a particularly tight construction nor so emphatically sloppy that messiness becomes an aesthetic all its own, but there’s something gleefully delirious, and playfully cynical, about how Hitch threads so many loosely connected bits together with only the most tenuous of a story, knowing that we’re along for the ride, all while admitting that all of this is just a glorified trick.

Which, of course, wouldn’t work if the film didn’t justify the trick. North by Northwest is immaculately constructed, a glistening diamond fabricated to reveal and hide the black hole at its core. Hitchcock, cinematographer Robert Burks, production designer Robert, composer Bernard Herrmann, and title designer Saul Bass all work over-time to execute their executive man Roger Thornhill, a successful advertisement man (what other job could he have?), who, through the tiniest, most offhand moment of confusion, is mistaken for one “George Kaplan,” who we learn is a government spy working to prevent Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) from his executing a particularly nefarious plot. What, precisely, Vandamm is doing is never really revealed, nor – and the film does everything it can except say this overtly – does it matter. The microfilm that serve as this film’s MacGuffin have never been so pointedly obtuse, so plainly irrelevant, just as the George Kaplan figure, who we eventually learn doesn’t really exist, is so much smoke and mirrors, a “wrong man” thriller where the right man doesn’t even exist in flesh and bone.

North by Northwest is an exquisitely paradoxical film, exploratory and sidewinding and yet cloistered and hermetic, as though each scene is a self-contained unit that only superficially connects to the rest of the piece. That sounds like a criticism, but it also feels like the film’s key realization. Everything in it is solid and spellbinding, but it’s also, ultimately, evaporative, as though the narrative might crumble if we get close enough. How could they really mistake this guy for the spy, and how could they continue to with each passing scene? What does Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) see in him, and why does she crumble so even as she proves so spiny and capable? In Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock turned a train heading out West into a gestalt that symbolized the dark passage of American modernity, and he figured Strangers on a Train as a mobile examination of troubled masculinity. Here, he offers a fantasy tour of America as a connected playground for spies to control behind the scenes, and for a filmmaker to do what he wants with.

What precisely they’re doing seems pitilessly opaque to everyone in the film, and finally unintelligible to us. The film is remarkably constructed to exploit that opacity and to revel in its own maneuvering of us into and around an elaborate enterprise it is masterminding. North by Northwest is a paradigmatic directorial sleight of hand, a film that is nearly being constructed out of thin air for us by the minute, so thoroughly impossible and yet so elegant that we really can’t notice. Early on, Thornhill practically admits as such when he remarks that his middle initial, an “O”, stands for nothing. Of course it doesn’t. He isn’t a real person, but Hitchcock wants to teasingly show us his “ROT” monogramed matchsticks, and if a middle initial is necessary to get us there, then so be it. Thornhill’s teasing admissions that this is all stage craft (“don’t tell me where we’re going, surprise me,” “not that I mind a slight case of abduction now and then”, “with such expert playacting, you make this very room a theater”) figure him as a somewhat self-aware icon and puppet, a man who seems almost to know that he is in a movie he can’t control. He’s the inverse of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Here is a man who acts with ease, who is aroused by being manipulated, who so enjoys being a cog that he doesn’t really realize, or doesn’t particularly mind, that he isn’t really looking.

Are we looking, the film questions? Should we? Or should we just enjoy ourselves? Should we imagine ourselves along for the ride, reveling in Hollywood’s manicured capacity to stoke the imagination? A cramped hotel dinner takes place in front of a lateral 19^th century nature painting, but elsewhere Thornhill finds himself in the middle of a Wild West stand-off on a desert highway, as though he’s been transported into the painting. Later Hitchcock concocts a forest that looks like a stage. When we climax in a Frank Lloyd Wright-esque mid-century nature-house atop Mt. Rushmore, perhaps America’s ultimate display of nature-conquering egotism, we’re left wondering what America can’t turn into a tool for its own devices, what image it can’t commandeer, and what precisely separates control from creativity, playing from playthings. Saul Bass’s phenomenal opening credits, all the way at the beginning of the film, are a glistening modernist diamond, abstracting a skyscraper’s visage into planar proto-pop art, but they’re also an admission of guilt. Abstract beauty, pure possibility, is revealed to be just another skyscraper, a forbidding monolith of anonymous panels.

The rub, of course, is that we can’t look away. I certainly couldn’t. Ernest Lehman’s screenplay is self-evidently self-satisfied, clearly enjoying its own attempts to play Hitchcock’s greatest hits, and to play us, but that texture is an obvious match for Hitchcock’s natural smugness and teasing superiority. That it was almost titled Breathless, the same year as Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic time machine of the same name, feels deeply apposite, two transformative visions of the cinema that simultaneously couldn’t be more different (Hitch’s mocking glee vs Godard’s playful derision) yet also share key sensibilities. Both are mordantly devilish in their own way. Both are so deeply, intimately, exactingly, brutally self-aware about the nature of cinematic manipulation. While Breathless nominally destroys cinema and North by Northwest seems to want to save it, both are closer than they initially seem. Hitch’s imperious craft is so lovingly close to cinema, so keyed into what makes cinema tick, so infatuated with cinematic texture, that it nearly, lovingly, strangles the medium to death.

Score: 10/10