North by Northwest is the Reference for Dramatic Irony

Warning: The footnotes contain (minor) spoilers.

I’ve always ascribed to the philosophy of “do[ing] one thing well” ¹ and, in the best way, I’m not sure there’s a film that can exemplify this principle more than North by Northwest. Not to take credit away from the cast and crew or Hitchcock himself - this film does everything well.

But this film does dramatic irony SO well, and the script is SO utterly saturated with it that it’s hard to appreciate anything else. The score and cinematography might be on point, but the script is so mind-blowing it completely steals the show.

The film centers around Cary Grant, an advertising executive in NYC who gets mistaken for someone else. And from that point on (around the 5-10 minute mark) someone is wrong about something.

Sometimes someone is wrong about something small. Sometimes some people are wrong about many things. Sometimes the whole country is being misled by newspaper headlines, and other times it’s just one person who knows something that gives them a slight edge in a specific situation. But no matter how big or how small, there’s always an information imbalance at play. And generally what people are wrong about increases greatly in severity, and very quickly.

And most importantly the audience is trickle-fed this most-valuable information at what I can only describe as a precision-calculated, Pavlovian-optimized rate, keeping you in a constant state of guess and shock. The film never lies to you, but it often omits information until absolutely need-to-know, and while sometimes the screenplay will make you suspicious before the reveal comes, sometimes it catches you in total surprise.² This energizes in a constant whiplash of emotion. Throughout the film you realize that the protagonist knows something that the antagonists don’t, giving him an advantage; then the enemies uncover something new, putting our hero back in danger. These switches can happen in as little as 30 seconds ³, keeping the ride exhilarating.

In parallel, the plot accelerates forward, escalating from large set piece to large set piece, toeing the line of absurdity the full way through. Despite the slightly above-average runtime of 136 minutes the film feels surprisingly tight and concise.

After all the twists and turns are settled, it might seem that there are fairly large plot-holes - with as many turns as this, there surely has to be. However, when you analyze it, tracking what every character thought and assumed you will likely find that there aren’t any significant plot-holes whatsoever. All of the characters acted in their self-interest, based on what they knew and believed at the time. Their motives just might have been different than what you thought they were, what you had assumed was true.

It's not a perfect film. It's true that Eva Marie Saint doesn’t look 26 and, even so, Cary Grant looks too old for her regardless. The plot does cross a little into absurdity at times. ⁴

But the first time I saw North by Northwest I immediately felt it was the greatest screenplay of all time. Even if that's not true, what I do know is that every time I see it I get the feeling that “they don’t make them like this anymore.” It is, at once, a romance, an action/adventure, and a thriller. It balances witty dialogue with big set pieces. It makes the audience feel smart. It feels like a better James Bond movie than any James Bond movie.

And, for all those reasons, North by Northwest is my favorite Hitchcock film.