I went into North by Northwest expecting to be thrilled. That’s what I understand a Hitchcock film to be, both from hearsay and personal experience with some of his other works. And while North by Northwest did entertain me for the duration of its run, I find that I am less enthralled with it as I mull it over. The immediate concerns are of course its dated depiction of women and their role within the plot of the film. The one major female, Eve Kendall, is introduced to us only as a potential romantic interest for the film’s protagonist, Roger Thornhill. And as she evolves over the course of the film, her actions and choices are entirely dictated by her relationship with Thornhill. Though I would argue the film makes a more subtle but nearly as egregious sin of storytelling in just being excessively dictated. By this, I mean that each event in the film follows the previous almost entirely because the plot demands that it be so, not because the characters would logically follow this course of action. This is particularly evident in the first half of the film, where Thornhill’s path precipitates from two events entirely outside of his control – being misidentified as George Kaplan, and then being framed for the murder of Lester Townshend. Because he is not making choices that dictate the path the story follows, while the story can be genuinely surprising and thrilling during its run, the film fails to remain memorable. The plot when viewed as a whole fails to congeal in any meaningful way, because Roger Thornhill is more akin to a leaf on the wind than an active protagonist in his story until the very end, when he chooses to rescue Eve. And for the two reasons I’ve described, I think that while Hitchcock certainly can keep his title has the master of suspense, in this film he may have sacrificed his characters and story solely for the end of maintaining that suspense.