North by Northwest is a 1959 American spy thriller film starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason, and produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
North by Northwest is a story about a man who is pursued throughout the United States by agents of a mysterious organization who are trying to stop him from foiling their plot to smuggle out national secrets on microfilm. This is one of numerous Hitchcock films with Bernard Herrmann's music soundtrack and graphic designer Saul Bass's opening title sequence, and it was the first to use lengthy kinetic typography in its opening titles.
North by Northwest is considered one of Hitchcock's iconic works from the 1950s, and is frequently ranked among the best films of all time. The United States Library of Congress chose it for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1995 because it was "culturally, historically, or aesthetically important." It was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece of comic, intelligent self-parody by reviewers for The New Yorker and The New York Times after its first screening.
The film had a huge influence on future James Bond films and action thrillers. The title of the film is said to have influenced the name of the popular annual live-music festival South by Southwest, which began in 1987 in Austin, Texas, with the name concept coming from Louis Black, editor and co-founder of the local alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle.
