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Quentin Tarantino Dumps On Alfred Hitchcock -- Four Times(and Calls NXNW "Mediocre")

posted a year ago by ecarle (14979)
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Quentin Tarantino may be a lot of things, but one thing he is, now in 2023 as I post this, is:

A famous auteur filmmaker, and not a 'cult" filmmaker, either. His movies are big hits all over the world. His movies are nominated in the big Oscar categories, and sometimes win: Best Supporting Actor for Christoph Waltz twice and Brad Pitt once. Two Best Original Screenplay Oscars.

QT rather shares his fame, I think, with that grand old master of the 1920s through the 1970s: Alfred Hitchcock.

Both men worked in "thrillers" or genre pieces; people die violently in almost all of their films. QT branched out into Westerns and a WWII movie but maintained Hitchcock's sense of style and violence and perversity.

Both men have followings -- Hitchcock had more then, but QT has plenty now.

And I think this: both Hitchcock and QT were strange looking, strange talking men whose personalities "in person" don't really fit the grand cinematic style and power and sophistication of their movies. In short, two weird guys who excited the world with their movies, not their personalities(though QT landed a supermodel wife and plenty of chicks before her, looks didn't much matter.)

QT rather sidestepped talking about Hitchcock in the beginning. Sometimes he could be a bit snarky ("I don't get why Hitchcock is like God, OK?") sometimes he would be more conciliatory. QT's biggest "bad quote" on Hitchocck is that he preferred the cheapjack 1983 sequel "Psycho II"(directed by the little-known, little-active Richard Franklin) to the original. Balderdash.

But I've gone looking recently and found QT to be a bit more over-all insulting about Hitchcock, and I think its worth some rebuttal.

Here are the QT quotes I have found so far:

ONE: "People discover North by Northwest at 22 and think its wonderful when actually it is a very mediocre movie."

TWO: "I've always felt that Hitchcock's acolytes took his cinematic and story ideas further. I love Brian De Palma's Hitchcock movies. I love Richard Franklin's and Curtis Hanson's Hitchcock meditations. I prefer those to actual Hitchcock."

THREE: "The 50s held him down, Hitchcock couldn't do what he, left to his own devices, would've wanted to do. By the time he could do it in the late 60s and early 70s, he was a little too old. If he could have gone where he wanted to go in the early 60s and through the 50's, he would have been a different filmmaker."

FOUR: "While DePalma liked making thrillers(for a little while at least), I doubt he loved watching them. Hitchcockian thrillers were, for him, a means to an end. That's why when he was forced to return to the genre the mid-eighties, they were so lacklustre. Ultimately , he resented having to make them Hitchcock's Frenzy might be a piece of crap, but I doubt Alfred was bored making it."

Hmm.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

ONE: "People discover North by Northwest at 22 and think its wonderful when actually it is a very mediocre movie."

--

OK. Here, QT is nsulting an IMAGINARY (to him) audience who discover NXNW at 22 and think its wonderful. (Such, silly, naive young people.) Hey I discovered NXNW a lot younger than 22 and it excited me for LIFE. And no WAY it is a very mediocre movie. It has landed on the Top 100 films of all time list of the AFI and Number 4 greatest thriller (AFI) and all sorts of critical lists and the reviews were even great in 1959 (not so Psycho and Vertigo, as much.)

Forget about the Rushmore climax and the classic crop duster scene(mediocre? my ass)...try the intricate camera movements and angles and great dialogue and acting of the early , tense "Glen Cove library scene."

Methinks that QT is a "content over style" guy, or something and while he's certainly entitled to his opinion, it just strikes me as so wrong on North by Northwest that he has lowered my opinion of him for CRITICAL thinking( it has not lowered my love of HIS movies.) (I know, like I matter -- he's world famous, and I'm not famous at all; he's superrich, and I'm not rich at all...but I get to have an opinion!)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

TWO: "I've always felt that Hitchcock's acolytes took his cinematic and story ideas further. I love Brian De Palma's Hitchcock movies. I love Richard Franklin's and Curtis Hanson's Hitchcock meditations. I prefer those to actual Hitchcock."

---
Well with Richard Franklin, that would be Psycho II, of which, QT's idol Brian DePalma told an interviewer, "Its not worth talking about" and which includes among its murder scenes a boyfriend/girlfriend episode lifted directly from...Jaws 2. I hear that Franklin's "Road Games' is pretty good, but the guy simply didn't have the longevity or following of the Main Man.

DePalma DID, almost, and I know that ALL of his movies were allowed to be gorier than Hitchcock's (the first thriller, Sisters, came a year after Hitchcock's brutal but not bloody Frenzy), but many of them are severely flawed in the script department -- plot, dialogue -- and DePalma always seemed to fumble his set-pieces. DePalma also never really got the Oscar respect that his peers Coppola,Spielberg, and Scorsese got. DePalma directed some of MY favorite movies(The Untouchables is my favorite of the 80's) but Hitchcock has a more lasting imprint.

QT cites Curtis Hanson as a Hitchcock copycat better than Hitchcock. Well, Hanson wrote and directed my favorite of the 90s -- LA Confidential -- but that's not terrribly Hitchcockian (well, a particular surprise murder was rather Psycho like.) I guess QT is talking of Hanson movies like The Bedroom Window(with Steve Gutenberg!) Bad Influence, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and The River Wild -- all of which were rather OK but no preparation for the greatenss of LAC. Oh, wait, The Silent Partner with Elliott Could and villain Chris Plummer. Pretty damn good but...no Rear Window or Psycho.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

THREE: "The 50s held him down, Hitchcock couldn't do what he, left to his own devices, would've wanted to do. By the time he could do it in the late 60s and early 70s, he was a little too old. If he could have gone where he wanted to go in the early 60s and through the 50's, he would have been a different filmmaker."

---

Well, isn't that TRUE of ALL filmmakers from the censored era(30s, 40s, 50s?) Maybe not Frank Capra, but Wilder's movies and Preminger's movies would have had more blatant sex and Hitchocck would have upped the sex AND the violence but...that's not when they worked so QT can hardly blame the directors in question, Hitch included.

I've noted that Hitchcock actually got away with a LOT of sex and violence in the 40's and 50s.

Violence: the opening (sexual) gay strangling in Rope; the raw brutality of the killing of Walter Slezak in Lifeboat(and the implied amputation scene); the diplomat shot in the face in Foreign Correspondent; the young boy impaled on an iron-spiked fence in Spellbound, the rape-like attack on Grace Kelly in Dial M(and the scissors in the back close-up as her assailant dies); the lingering knife in the back death of Louis Bernard in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Sex: Ingrid Bergman's trampy ways in Notorious(and pretty direct references to sex with both Cary Grant and Claude Rains on her part); Miss Torso's gyrations in Rear Window; the sexual banter twixt Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief; James Stewart having see Kim Novak nude in Vertigo; Eva Marie Saint's blatant come-on to Cary Grant on the train in NXNW...EVERYBODY's sexual banter in The Trouble With Harry(plus "I'd like to paint you in the nude" on first meeting.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

QT knows what we all know: eventually the movies could show more violence and more sex(though QT has recently given an interview about why he does NOT film sex scenes in his movies, on balance -- less DeNiro and Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown, a seconds-long sex joke.) Eventually, Hitchcock's movies could NOT compete with modern films for blood and horror and action and sexuality -- but they sure DID run the table in their time, and Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain and Frenzy were damn shocking in their violence with Psycho, Marnie and Frenzy taking on sex.

QT in suggesting that by the 70's Hitchcock was too old to do what he wanted to do reminds us: Hitchcock DID manage to get that sexual and horrific rape-strangling scene into Frenzy-- t that's Hitchcock at his WORST(sexual violence-wise, not as a movie), and QT sort of built his career from that kind of content for the WHOLE career(except for jackie Brown.)

QT re-staged at least the strangling part of Frenzy in Inglorious Basterds; and staged some dismemberment murders of young women in Death Proof, and gave us wall to wall samarai sword carnage in Kill Bill (complete with spurting blood and flying limbs) much of it girl-on-girl killings; and had Sam Jackson narrate a particularly lurid sexual torture of a white man by a black man in "The Hateful Eight" and showed Sam Jackson entering a scene of a white man torturing a black man in Django Unchained...

...is there where QT regrets that Hitchcock could not go?

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

FOUR: "While DePalma liked making thrillers(for a little while at least), I doubt he loved watching them. Hitchcockian thrillers were, for him, a means to an end. That's why when he was forced to return to the genre the mid-eighties, they were so lacklustre. Ultimately , he resented having to make them Hitchcock's Frenzy might be a piece of crap, but I doubt Alfred was bored making it."

---

Before reaching the main point of contention (Frenzy might be a piece of crap), consider QT's take on DePalma (this entire passage is from his new book).

QT is basically saying that after DePalma flopped with a comedy("Get to Know Your Rabbit") he started making HItchcock homages to survive(and if QT thinks that DePalma's Obsession is better than Vertigo...ay ay ay.) QT contends that DePalma actually switched to action in the 80's(Scarface, The Untouchables) but that's not entirely true; he kept making his Hitchocck copycat stuff in the 80's and 90's and then added more action in the 90's(Carlito's Way, Mission Impossible.)

In any event, it begs the question: DePalma seems to have gotten STUCK with his Hitchcock copycat label even as his peers Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese "branched out" and were taken more seriously.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Ultimately , (DePalma) resented having to make them(Hitchcock copycats.)

---

Does QT KNOW that? Did DePalma personally TELL him that? Or is that just QT's guess?

---

Hitchcock's Frenzy might be a piece of crap, but I doubt Alfred was bored making it."

-- So QT is saying that whereas DePalma's heart wasn't in making Hitchcock movies, Hitchcock's WAS. Makes sense, doesn't it? Gives Hitchcock the edge, doesn't it?

"Hitchcock's Frenzy might be a piece of crap" suggests to me that QT THINKS that. It would be nice to know WHY. My guess is that even though the movie had one ultra-violent sex strangling to "forecast the QT era," a lot of it was probably too staid and tamped down and expository for QT's taste: any of the scenes with Blaney and Babs together, probably even the twee British comedy of the Oxford dinners.

No matter. I think by the time we get through with all of QTs quotes, a guy who thinks North by Northwest is mediocre, a guy who likes Psycho II better than Psycho, and a guy who has no use for HItchcock's 50's films ...is never going to be brought over to Hitchcock fanhood.

His loss. But I still like his movies pretty much as much as I liked Hitchcocks. They are both genre auteurs, whose movies have great scripts AND great cinematic style.

PS. QT is some years younger than me and was raised in a pretty turbulent hardscrabble household and saw his movies in some tough places and perhaps just never had reason to connect to Hitchcock's omnipresence on network TV in the 60's. Maybe QT never experienced "the hype of Hitchcock" like I did in my more settled childhood.

[–] [deleted] 9 months ago

Are you done with sniffing your own farts? It's getting rather preposterous now.

[–] MCguy (949) 5 months ago

"Methinks that QT is a "content over style" guy"

Really, I think the opposite; QT is nothing but style. I am willing to be enlightened. Which of his movies focus on content? Or are we defining content differently. I see nothing deep abut QT's movies; I see them as pure entertainment.

[–] tsrts (302) 7 months ago

While Hitchcock may be the Master of Suspense,
Tarantino is the Master of Self Promotion.
He knows exactly how publicity works, so he will say and do stuff just to promote himself.
Truth be told, North by Northwest is better than all Tarantino films combined.

[–] MavKilledGoose (786) 5 months ago

The cropduster scene is impressive for all of its layers of stupidity.

First of all, it's dusting crops where there are no crops.

Second, what is the small plane supposed to do when it swoops down? Scare Thornhill to death? If it's supposed to make contact, then the pilot is needlessly endangering their life.

Third, there's machine gun fire. North by Northwest is my mother's favorite movie, so I bought it for her ages ago on DVD. I borrowed it once, and watched the commentary by the screenwriter. As I recall, he said that it was indeed supposed look like an accident and lamented the gunfire.

You know what would have made a lot more sense for the bad guys to do? Anything else. The closest Thornhill came to dying was almost getting run over by the truck, and that driver wasn't even trying to kill him. The bad guys should have struck him with a car if they wanted to make it look like an accident. Or brought the car to a stop and gunned him down. Amazing, that. Stopping. Planes, see, cannot stop in mid-air, which makes it difficult to carry out the murder plan.

Other parts of the movie are ridiculous. The repartee holds up well, but it's not an outstanding movie.

[–] roger1 (2493) 5 months ago

(aka ecarle.)

As a true fan of North by Northwest -- from a very early age, and from a very long time ago -- not when it was released in 1959, but when it hit network TV in 1967 and then spent the 60s and 70s in "revival house" movie theaters and packed full house college showings ...I beg to differ, of course...but then I also know that "that was then and this is now," and the film is perhaps best kept as the memory of another time that it is.

Nor am I out to "prove you wrong" or make you change your mind. I can't...you won't.

But your take on the very famous "crop duster scene" I think allows for an opportunity to educate anyone reading on some aspects of that scene which have kept it in movie history for decades:

Two quotes from Hitchcock:

"People are too focussed on the content of movies, when they should be focussed -- in my movies at least -- on style."

"The fact is that I practice absurdity quite religiously."

Add in such critical comments as "Hitchcock is one of the great avant garde artists of our time" and "the crop duster scene is elegantly photographed and perfectly timed" and one gets closer to the greatness of the scene.

And one has to remember: there weren't all that many action movies and thrillers MADE when North by Northwest came out in 1959. Came the 80's and 90s, there was a "North by Northwest"(action movie) every week, but back in 1959..nada. NXNW begat Bond began Indy begat Die Hard begat The Matrix...as a seminal matter.

But the crop duster scene -- as a HITCHCOCK scene -- has just as much to do with the minutes BEFORE the crop duster arrives as it has to do with the action WHEN the crop duster arrives. Hitchcock masterly builds tempo, suspense, and not a little ironic comedy.

The set-up is that Roger Thornhill has been purposely directed to the middle of nowhere, and when he gets there (opening shot, high angle over an empty gigantic SPACE of flatlands)...we are wondering: what the heck is going to happen NOW?

CONT

[–] roger1 (2493) 5 months ago

And Hitchcock makes us wait. And wait. And WAIT. And wait some more.

Bus drops off Thornhill. Thornhill looks around (POV: what he sees: nothing, nothing and more nothing.)

Cars drive past him, trucks drive past him...one dumping a huge cloud of dust on him. And yet he waits.

A car appears out of the corn, drops off a man.

Sudden shot: Thornhill in coat and tie on one side of the road...the other man..mysterious...facing him.

This shot got roaring laughter and applause at the revival houses. Is a COMEDY moment, but also very profound in how Hitchcock's silent, deadpan cutting just suddenly brings it on screen like a finger snap.

Roger approaches the man...is the man a killer?(we wonder, because WE know, and Thornhill doesn't ...that Eve has sent him off at Vandamm's request to likely death.)

Deadpan dialogue:

Roger: Hot day.
Man: Seen worse.
Roger: Is your name Kaplan?
Man: Can't say it is...cuz it isn't.

And then onto the CLASSIC line:

Man: That's funny.
Roger: What?
Man: That crop duster's dusting crops where there ain't no crops.

This is called "the frission" -- a French word meaning...something like "a warning that something bad is going to happen." Elsewhere in Hitchcock "the frisson" is the door opening on a bedroom at the top of the stairs as the detective approaches it in Psycho, or a single sparrow suddenly standing in a fireplace when no other sparrows are there -- until hundreds are -- in The Birds.

The man -- just a farmer -- gets on a new bus, the bus leaves and now we get the deadpan comedy of FINALLY finding out what will endanger Roger: indeed, the crop duster. Getting closer. Closer. Closer. As Roger deadpans in close up.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2493) 5 months ago

There was a comedian named Charlie Callas who used to do a whole bit of Cary Grant in the build-up to the crop duster scene, just standing on stage and looking in the distance, and unbuttoning his coat and eventually falling to the stage in confusion. Callas understood the great COMEDY of the crop duster scene. In the build up at least.

Hitchcock noted many times that the crop duster scene -- invented out of whole cloth in Ernest Lehman's original screenplay with Hitchcock's supervision, not from a novel -- was meant to invert the usual "man going to get killed" scene. He moved the scene from night to bright sunny day. From an urban city to "wide open spaces"(NXNW is a very "All American" road movie.)

And there is a certain terror in the realization that Roger has nowhere really to run to. Nowhere, really, to hide. His attempt to hide in the corn is quickly reversed when the plane sprays him and drives him out ("Always use the means available in a scene" to drive suspense, noted Hitch. A crop duster dispenses insectiside.)

As to why Vandamm when to all that trouble to kill Roger THAT way, well, its a movie and a rather fantastic movie at that but one thing we learn about Vandamm is that he is a rather PLAYFUL villain. Not for him just having people shot. He has Roger made drunk and put in a Mercedes to drive it on a cliff road. He sends this "early drone plane" to kill Roger among the plains and corn. He is a Communist spy who keeps his hideout house right behind the Presidential heads on Mount Rushmore. He's a funny guy.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2493) 5 months ago

There are great shots once the action begins. One has Roger on one knee while the plane circles high above and behind him.

And the FAMOUS shot is the one -- with no effects involved -- of the plane diving long and slow at Thornhill as he ELEGANTLY tries to shoo the plane away before running straight at us as the plane just misses him and fires upon him. (In 1993, Spielberg mimicked this shot as the T-Rex chased Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.)

There's also the GREAT shot of Cary Grant -- at age 55 -- running a sprint to the cornfield as we run right alongside him.

The crop duster scene is 7 minutes of funny deadpan build-up that unleashes action and then ends explosively.
"A great short story on film," wrote one critic.

Keep in mind the plane is presented as a CREATURE, not a machine with men in it -- that's more of how Hitchcock worked - he dehumanized evil. (One of the men -- revealed only in the script -- is Licht -- the bald guy who helped Valerian kidnap Roger at the Plaza -- Licht is part of the bad guy team in the movie and then he disappears after the crop duster scene.

And how was Vandamm's "playful" plane supposed to kill Thornhill? Like with all military planes before 1959 and many drones after 1959. Gunfire from the air.

Funny thing: the crop duster scene isn't my favorite set-piece in North by Northwest. The Mount Rushmore climax is, filled as it is with Bernard Herrmann's thunderous exciting score(he has to go silent during the deadpan crop duster scene) and playing out as an even MORE fantastical memory. The Mount Rushmore set-piece in North by Northwest is my favorite scene in Hitchcock.

Also the movie has a massively intelligent script.

Consider one point: when they first meet at the Glen Cove mansion library, Roger Thornhill thinks that Phillip Vandamm is Lester Townsend, and Phillip Vandamm thinks that Roger Thornhill is George Kaplan! Incredibly brilliant.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2493) 5 months ago

The American Film Institute made a list of the 100 greatest thrillers of all time. These were the top four

1. Psycho
2. Jaws
3. The Exorcist
4. North by Northwest

Yep.

One last thing: when Hitchcock was alive and working, he told fellow director Francois Truffaut -- his interviewer -- that he went crazy dealing with people who focussed on every little plot point when he was making fanciful entertainments. He called these people "the plausibilists." (As in "is it plausible that a villain would send a crop duster to kill the hero?")

Well sites like moviechat are filled with plausibilists, breaking every plot point down to tear them apart. But today's plausibilists get to cheat -- they can watch a movie many times, rewind it to watch things again, freeze the frame, etc. Hitchcock didn't have to deal with THAT...you watched a movie once and that was it.

I daresay if Hitchcock were alive today...he'd quit. Because the plausibilists have taken over.

[–] MavKilledGoose (786) 5 months ago

Not unlike how the natural default for human beings is warlordism rather than democracy, they also tend toward hero worship rather than fair-minded rationality. "An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance." People will believe something more credible and clever if you tell them Ben Franklin said it, and they'll think something is better and more exciting if it was directed by Hitchcock. I have little doubt the scene works for you "as a HITCHCOCK scene." This is one of the instances where general audiences can bring a more fair-minded assessment to bear than critics as they're not carrying as much baggage.

"[T]here weren't all that many action movies and thrillers MADE when North by Northwest came out in 1959."

As I said, film is a more immature art form. QWERTY keyboards have not taken the world by storm because the layout is so efficient for the modern era. In terms of apologetics for the scene, you're reduced to "stylization." In your earlier rant, you engaged in some trolling about how Tarantino is more interested in content than style. Tarantino, the guy who had a character literally draw a square on screen.

The movie was organized around three set pieces to give audiences "whammy" moments. You can rationalize some kind of commentary about a communist spy on Mt. Rushmore because of a sly sense of humor, but it happened there because it would look cool. Something like the Matrix is superior because all of the style stems from the premise. A person does not have to suspend disbelief for one thing after another; they merely have to buy into the premise.

[–] roger1 (2493) 4 months ago

The movie was organized around three set pieces to give audiences "whammy" moments.

--

I think it is interesting that "back then" both North by Northwest and Hitchcock's very next movie, Psycho -- were BOTH built around three whammy moments -- action in the first film, shock murders and horror in the second:

NXNW:

Drunken car cliff drive
Crop Duster
Mount Rushmore

Psycho:

Shower murder
Staircase murder
Fruit cellar climax(killer revealed and thwarted)

Back then, the idea of "action beats every seven minutes"( a formula evidently developed for the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard films) or "shock murders every seven minutes"(see Friday the 13th; Psycho has only two murders) was too much for audiences to take or for filmmakers to be willing to film.

Still, Hitchcock knew how to create suspense(and add in comedy bits or romantic scenes) in between those widely spaced "whammies." It was a different time, a different place...certainly more "innocent" in terms of what a thriller was and perhaps more simple in the plotting (in NXNW, we learn only that the villain is "an importer-exporter of government secrets," modernly Silicon Valley scientists are hired to invent deep-think scientific formual MacGuffins.)

---

You can rationalize some kind of commentary about a communist spy on Mt. Rushmore because of a sly sense of humor, but it happened there because it would look cool.

---

Oh I know that the climax happened on Mount Rushmore because it would look cool -- as Hitchcock said, "the Mount Rushmore scene was the reason I made the entire movie" -- but he had to have a REASON to get the story there. So Leo G. Carroll was given one line to get the story to Mount Rushmore: "Vandamm has a place near there." Just ONE LINE to get the movie there.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2493) 4 months ago

Now once it was established that "Vandamm has a place near there," I didn't RATIONALIZE a Communist spy choosing to have a hideout near Democracy's Temple...I MUSED upon WHY he would have such a house there and that's my solution, and I like it. My secondary rationale (not to excuse it, but to explain it) was that South Dakota was close enough to Canada and "the other side"(the Soviet Union) for Vandamm and company to fly to escape(I mean, there's a landing strip near the house!)

For 1959, that is good enough plotting for me.

But back to the Mount Rushmore climax: not only does it "look cool," it SOUNDS cool, with Bernard Herrmann's thunderous, epic action music(a precursor to John Williams in his Star Wars/Superman mode) to make everything more exciting and the romance coming together with the life-or-death climax(Thornhill had to run from the crop duster all alone, he has the love of his life beside him on Rushmore, they agree that if they survive this, they will marry, it all comes together.)

North by Northwest and Psycho -- miraculously released one year apart, each a "summer blockbuster" before THAT phrase was invented -- are my two favorite movies, tied back into the younger person I was when I saw them(or in Psycho's case, HEARD about it from schoolyard friends -- I wasn't allowed to see it for several years after it hit TV in 1967.) With North by Northwest, its all about Mount Rushmore. No other movie before it climaxed there, no other movie after there has climaxed there -- it stands all alone as the movie that ends on Mount Rushmore. This messed up Hitchcock's career thereafter: his "dramatic" spy films Torn Curtain and Topaz had no such thrilling climaxes; his final film Family Plot(a non-spy movie) was written by Ernest Lehman - who wrote NXNW as an original -- and IT couldn't come close to that Rushmore climax.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2493) 4 months ago

Something like the Matrix is superior because all of the style stems from the premise.

---

I find it interesting that you use The Matrix as a comparision to North by Northwest, because I see The Martrix as a "family successor" TO North by Northwest - in that the hero ("Neo") starts the movie as an innocent "everyman" and eventually becomes equal to any professional spy or soldier against the villains.

A person does not have to suspend disbelief for one thing after another; they merely have to buy into the premise.

--

Fair enough, but the premise to The Matrix is more in a realm both of science fiction fantasy and of philosophy -- perhaps even theology. And one thing that did NOT happen to "North by Northwest" was three sequels that totally undid the brilliance of the original movie.

I think all we have to "believe" in North by Northwest is that an "everyman"(Cary Grant) could be kidnapped by spies and spend the rest of the movie escaping death traps. That they were "creative" death traps (drunken drive, crop duster attack) was perhaps Hitchocck's own creativity being expressed via Vandamm as his stand-in (one film later, the murderous Mrs. Bates will be Hitchcock's stand-in, creatively using a shower as one kind of death trap, and a staircase for another, so as to be able to keep her victims trapped and off balance -- a slippery shower and staircase upon which to fall are CREATIVE kill zones.