Over the years we’ve watched many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films and I believe this marks the last of his most important ones. It’s also the only Hitchcock film I think that is an outright action movie. Partway through it I thought to myself, “Wow, this is Hitchcock’s attempt at a Bond film!” Except that it actually predates the first James Bond film, Dr. No, by three years.

Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, a New York advertising executive who is nabbed by two thugs who believe he is a man named George Kaplan. They take him to a luxuriously appointed mansion and try to interrogate him. After he refuses to admit that he is Kaplan, they try to kill him by staging a car accident but he manages to escape. The next day, he finds that no one believes his story and that the mansion belongs to a United Nations diplomat. He makes contact only to discover that this isn’t the man who kidnapped him and to see him murdered before his eyes. With the police now believing him to be the murderer, he decides to track down the real Kaplan to clear his name. He runs into a lovely woman on a train who helps him evade the police but naturally she has nefarious motives. Meanwhile the U.S. intelligence services are fully aware of what is going on. Thornhill has been mistaken by their enemies as one of their secret agents and they decide that the best thing to do is to play along.

There’s no dark dissection of human psychology here, no recurrent motifs and subtle themes at play. Instead we have is a straight up action thriller with all the elements that we’ve long since become familiar with due to the James Bond films. We have car chases, disguises, the beautiful femme fatale of ambiguous loyalties, exciting action set-pieces, even a climax that place in a suitably spectacular locale. The only thing missing are shoot-outs since Thornhill isn’t actually a trained secret agent. This actually enhances the tension and the sense of danger. Since we know that he really is just an advertising executive, every peril that befalls him feels real and we know that he can’t just shoot himself out of every situation. He needs to figure out ad hoc solutions all the time so the film never becomes predictable and is always exciting.

Unfortunately as in many modern action movies, you’ll realize that the plot is full of flaws if you take a pause to think about them. The twists and turns the story takes obscure the fact that it is never explained how and why the villain is using the house of a UN diplomat without his knowledge. The iconic scene of a crop duster plane chasing Cary Grant in the fields looks fantastic but it doesn’t really make sense why anyone would choose this as an assassination technique. Apparently Hitchcock’s original idea was even more implausible: he wanted the villain to try to kill him with a tornado but the scriptwriter asked how anyone could control one. I guess the phenomenon of directors wanting spectacular scenes at the expense of any measure of realism has a long pedigree in cinematic history.

Still, Hitchcock’s masterful skills as a director keeps the film flowing at a smooth pace. I enjoyed how Thornhill and the audience together with him are gradually introduced into the world of intrigues. Since he feels more like a real character than James Bond, we actually come to care for what happens to him. I’d have preferred Hitchcock to ramp down Thornhill’s abilities even more. He seems entirely too self-assured in the face of danger to be just an ordinary office worker and the one throwaway scene of him breaking into a random woman’s room clearly sets him up as a kind of Casanova . But this is as good a spy thriller film as we can expect. As a mere action movie, I would consider this a notch below Hitchcock’s more serious work. It’s great entertainment and is a fine example of film craftsmanship. I’d certainly consider it better than any of the actual James Bond films.