Admission $4.50 Single or Double Bill

Our series, America in the Fifties, concludes for now with two brilliant, cynical films from 1959. Both films lock horns with the American male identity crisis, and both emerge with a triumphant call for individuality and humanity for the decade to come. (In both films, incidentally, the train as setting and sexual symbol makes a brief but glorious comeback before the era of road movies gets underway.) Hitchcock dubbed his exhilarating comedy-thriller North by Northwest “my final word on the chase film.” Cary Grant is your basic, grey-flannel-suited ad-man, Roger O. Thornhill (“O for Nothing”), until he is mistaken by the police for an assassin, and by an international spy ring for a double agent. The ensuing chase carries him across the American landscape, where every national monument presents a new challenge to his true identity, not to mention his life, and an effort to expunge him like just one more insect finally makes him fighting mad. A witty script by Ernest Lehman, and the sexual chemistry between Grant and Eva Marie Saint, embellished by Hitchcock's wry visual humor, all make this a provocative alternative to the standard sex-and-spy fare. (JB)