“In Saboteur, made in 1942, Hitchcock satirized an America that cluttered its landscape with billboards. In the new America of North by Northwest, advertising is everywhere. America has become a place, the film continually reminds us, where human beings and works of art alike are reduced to objects bought and sold. Eve is treated as a piece of sculpture and statues also are denied their souls. Yet North by Northwest, even as it extends and updates Saboteur's satire on America, also transcends it. The earlier thriller viewed America from the outside, through the eyes of a recent settler amused by his new home. North by Northwest acknowledges the awful truth that Hitchcock has become an American. And he has discovered his love for the America of which he remains an uncompromising critic. Part of what the comedy of North by Northwest declares is that despite everything the mythical America in which happiness can be imagined to be fulfilled in the love between a man and a woman, indeed in a marriage, is still real to us. Of course, that we can still imagine happiness and that we still pursue it do not mean that even its possibility can be taken for granted, but that is the burden of The Birds and Marnie, not North by Northwest, to declare. In all these late films, Hitchcock's meditation on his authorship, his meditation on art (in particular the art of film), his meditation on love, his meditation on human identity and his meditation on America are seamlessly joined.” --William Rothman