At the end of an ordinary work day, advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) hurries from a Madison Avenue office building to a business meeting in the Oak Room bar of the Plaza Hotel. Having just asked his secretary to phone his mother, he realizes that she won't be able to reach her, so he will need to send a telegram instead. When a hotel pageboy passes by calling for "Mr. Kaplan...Mr. George Kaplan...,"
To watch the trailer of "North by Northwest" click the play button.
Thornhill flags him down to ask about sending a telegram. This draws the attention of two henchmen, Valerian (Adam Williams) and Licht (Robert Ellenstein), who mistake Roger to be Kaplan because from their vantage point he appears to be answering the page. As Roger steps into the corridor to send his wire, the henchmen abduct Roger at gunpoint and force him into a waiting car.
Wordlessly, they drive him out of Manhattan to a country estate displaying the name "Townsend" at its entrance. The car snakes up a long winding driveway to the front entrance. A maid lets them in the front door, and Roger is locked inside the library of the mansion. Left alone, he finds a newspaper on the desk addressed to "Mr. Lester Townsend, 169 Baywood, Glen Cove, N.Y."
Shortly, the library door opens and there enters an urbane gentleman (James Mason), evidently none other than Townsend himself, followed soon after by his personal secretary, Leonard (Martin Landau). The gentleman addresses his captive as "Kaplan," and by his questions, Roger can only assume that the real Kaplan must be some sort of secret agent on this man's trail. Roger tries to convince him that his name is Thornhill and has never been anything else, but his captor will not hear of it. To "prove" his point, the man proceeds to recite the elusive Kaplan's recent itinerary of hotels, cities, and ever-changing home towns, including Kaplan's present occupancy of room 796 at the Plaza Hotel, and his future stops in Chicago and Rapid City, South Dakota. To find out how much "Kaplan" knows about his organization and their current arrangements, he puts Leonard in charge of extracting the information while he withdraws to join Mrs. Townsend (Josephine Hutchinson) and their party guests. Leonard unseals a fifth of bourbon taken from a liquor cabinet, and with the aid of Valerian and Licht, he begins to force the whiskey down Roger's throat.
Having failed to get any information from their victim, Valerian and Licht place the severely intoxicated Thornhill behind the wheel of a Mercedes on a seaside highway under cover of darkness, planning to guide him off of a cliff to his death. Almost unaware of his surroundings, Roger comes sufficiently alert at the last moment to push Valerian out of the car and start driving for himself. The two thugs follow him down the winding highway in their own car. Roger, on the verge of passing out and plagued with double vision, manages to careen his way down the cliffside highway without hitting anything. As he slams on brakes to barely avoid running over a bicyclist, a pursuing police car plows into the rear of the Mercedes, and a third car plows into the rear of the police car. Finding themselves overmatched, the two henchmen drive away leaving Roger in police custody.
Showing this week in Athens at:
STELLA (Open-air) 34 Tenedou (210.865.7200)
North by Northwest Fri-Sun 20.45, 23.00
23.08.2008