WS Chronicle

The RiverRun International Film Festival will screen the 65th anniversary restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” on Friday, Oct. 25, at 7:30 p.m. The screening – sponsored by Nelson Mullins, Denise Gunter and EMBER Audio + Design – will take place at Marketplace Cinemas, located at 2095 Peters Creek Parkway in Winston-Salem.

Tickets are $12, and students receive free admission with ID. RiverRun will contribute net ticket proceeds from the screening to the North Carolina Arts Foundation’s N.C. Arts Disaster Relief Fund to help neighboring artists and arts organizations in Western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Tickets are available at riverrunfilm.com.

Rob Davis, RiverRun director and a speaker at New York University’s Alfred Hitchcock Centennial Conference in 1999, will provide a special introduction to the screening. Davis, who knows one of the stars of  “North by Northwest,” Eva Marie Saint, and Hitchcock’s daughter, Pat, describes the film as murder and mayhem from Manhattan to the Midwest to Mount Rushmore.

“The 65th anniversary of ‘North by Northwest’ also coincides with the 125th anniversary of Hitchcock’s birth and the 100th birthday of one of the film’s stars, Eva Marie Saint, who celebrated her birthday in July,” Davis said. “This will be a fantastic screening and is of particular importance because it benefits our friends in the artistic community in Western North Carolina who desperately need the support of all of us.”

“North by Northwest” is the story of New York advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), who is mistaken for a man named George Kaplan by a ring of spies and is framed for murder. Thornhill is pursued across the country by both the police and the bad guys, and Thornhill hides out in the sleeping compartment of Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) on a 20th Century Limited train bound for Chicago. After Thornhill has a harrowing encounter with a crop duster on the Indiana prairie, he and Kendall eventually find themselves in a chase across the faces of Mount Rushmore.

According to film historian Neil Sinyard, “North by Northwest” remains the greatest of all comedy thrillers because of its ability to be at its funniest when also at its most frightening. Hitchcock’s exploitation of the dramatic contrast between bizarre foreground and benign background has seldom been more ingeniously demonstrated than in “North by Northwest.” A hotel lobby is the setting for kidnapping, the United Nations Building for murder, and the stone face of Mount Rushmore for perilous pursuit. Most famously, Hitchcock even injects paranoia into a prairie setting.