ALEX FARBA

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Action and suspense: A hapless New York advertising executive is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies.

Asking which is the best Hitchcock is something like asking which is the best Beethoven symphony, but if pressed to the wall I would call  NBNW Hitchcock's Ninth (and Psycho, his Fifth).

The coolest of Grant and the hottest of Marie Saint is simply

the coolest film ever made from every angle you can think of.

Few people would contend that Cary Grant was not the coolest leading man of Hollywood's golden age but this pic is the peak of his coolness, along with that the coolest James Mason ever as the slickest polite villain of all time and  the slinkiest Eva Marie Saint ever, all adds up to one of the slickest pieces of celluloid entertainment ever conceived.

Most Hitchcock movies have one unforgettable white knuckle cliff hanger sequence but NBNW has two -- the chase out in the wheatfields by a poisonous crop duster biplane and the final chase across the faces of the four presidents at Mount Rushmore, which ends up literally ... as a cliffhanger.

Even a third if you include the comical auction scene where Grant keeps making outrageous bids to attract the police and thus escape the clutches of the killers lurking in the room waiting to get him.

So much has been written about this picture that there is no need to recount the plot other to say that it is a towering masterpiece of the romantic suspense drama genre with all players at the top of their game - and don't forget a young menacing Martin Landau as Mason's cold blooded sidekick, another great actor  who just passed away on July 15, 2017 at age 89.

NBNW is frequently rerun on TV so it's not hard to catch up with but it never gets old or fails to make you hold your breath even when you know what's coming next. An ultimate classic.

Mason and Landau in NBNW