State’s Classic Film series selection thrills with Hitchcock classic
One of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrilling masterpieces will be on the big screen in Uniontown next month.
“North by Northwest” will be the March selection for The State Theatre Center for Art’s Classic Film Series showing at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. March 9.
Hitchcock enlisted the help of Cary Grant, James Mason and Eva Marie Saint to tell the story of mistaken identity, national security, adventure and survival.
Audiences meet Roger O. Thornhill (Grant, “Charade” and “To Catch a Thief”), an advertising executives from New York. It’s not long before he’s swept up in a fateful journey when he’s thought to be someone else — George Kaplan — and interrogated by a mystery man (James Mason, “Lolita” and “The Verdict”).
Roger’s captors attempt to break him, to get any information they can out of the unsuspecting man, but what he doesn’t know may be his downfall. When Roger finally thinks he’s found an ally in Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint, “On the Waterfront” and “Superman Returns”), his world is thrown into more chaos when it’s found she may be involved with the mystery man, named at the end of the film.
Roger also encounters Clara Thornhill (Jessie Royce Landis, “Airport” and “The Swan”), The Professor (Leo G. Carroll, “Spellbound” and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E”), Lester Townsend (Philip Ober, “From Here to Eternity” and “Broken Lance”), Leonard (Martin Landau, “Ed Wood” and “Tucker: The Man and His Dream”), Valerian (Adam Williams, “The Big Heat” and “Darby’s Rangers”), Victor Larrabee (Edward Platt, “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Get Smart”) and Licht (Robert Ellenstein, “The Tingler” and “Inherit the Wind”) along the way.
Next year, the Hitchcock classic will reach its 60th premier anniversary. To this day, though, it’s still noted as a must-see. “North by Northwest” holds a steady 100 percent fresh rating from critics and audiences from the media review website, RottenTomatoes.com, while members of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) have given it 8.4 out of 10 stars.
In Jack Moffitt’s original review in The Hollywood Reporter, he wrote that while the story itself isn’t real, “Hitchcock makes it seem real.”
“Of course, Hitchcock doesn’t achieve this triumph entirely by himself. Cary Grant, as a glib Madison Avenue huckster, mistaken for a Central Intelligence agent by a group of Iron Curtain spies, is simply great,” Moffitt wrote nearly 60 years ago. “He delivers a marvelous series of close-ups when the heavies, after forcing a bottle of bourbon down his throat, place him in a Mercedes convertible and head him for a cliff. Struggling with double vision and drunkenness — with eyes now bugged out with horror and now drooping and glazed, he gets a laugh and a shriek out of every grimace.”
Tickets are $5 for adults and $3 for seniors, students or children. The film is not rated.
“North by Northwest” is part of the classic film series that is supported by the Herald-Standard Be Local program and sponsored by 84 Lumber, Nemacolin Woodlands Resort and Spa and the Hardy and Magerko families, along with the State Theatre, to create an event around each of the two viewings of the monthly movie.
Coming soon
The 2017-2018 Classic Film Series will also include: “The Alamo” (April 13, 2018), “The Goonies” (May 18, 2018) and “The is Spinal Tap” (June 15, 2018).