Destination Hitchcock: The Making of 'North by Northwest'

Destination Hitchcock: The Making of North By Northwest (2000)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Decent but overall disappointing look at the making of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 classic with Cary Grant. Eva Marie Saint hosts this documentary, which features interviews with Pat Hitchcock, screenwriter Ernest Lehman, story-boarder Robert Boyle and Martin Landau. This is a rather unique documentary in terms of how it tells the story because what we basically get is a production diary as Saint narrates the order in which the film was shot. She starts off talking about stealing a shot at the United Nations and then they moved to Chicago where she joined the film and then on out West to South Dakota where the Mount Rushmore controversy started and caused them to move the rest of the production to California. All of this is interesting but there are several times where we're just told that the production moved and then we don't get anything else. There really doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to some of the stories that we're told and I think it has to do with them telling the stories as the film was shot. This was an interesting idea but I just don't think it paid off. There are still some fun stories including all the trick photography that had to be done on the crop dusting sequence and what Grant was paid when the film went over schedule. Landau offers up a nice story on something that happened when Grant talked to all the cast members except him and there's some nice footage from the film's premiere.