Alfred Hitchcock’s playful light comedy North by Northwest, next up in our Modernism in Film series queue, is the perfect tonic to soothe our post-election anxieties. A film set in 1950s paranoia, it stars an urbane and witty Cary Grant as advertising executive Roger Thornhill, who gets mistaken for a spy and is on the run from a sinister organization run by suave villain Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), who owns an ultramodern retreat atop Mt. Rushmore. It is one of Hitchcock’s most entertaining movies, cooly sophisticated and suspenseful yet romantic and warm. It’s also a gleaming 50s Cadillac of filmmaking craft, well-appointed in graphic design (Saul Bass), cinematography (Robert Burks), and production design (Robert Boyle). All captured in the luscious widescreen beauty of VistaVision Technicolor, where everyone and just about everything looks clean, modern, beautiful, and luxurious. A dusty cornfield has never looked so good.
And it only gets better with age. Over the summer, Martin Scorcese’s Film Foundation and Warner Bros. released a restored print of North by Northwest in glorious 70mm that, for the first time, fully exploits the high resolution of the VistaVision format. While we can’t screen 70mm at the Lawrence Arts Center’s Microcinema, we hope to have the next best thing: a soon-to-be-released 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray that will reveal every speck of dandruff in Cary Grant’s expertly coiffed hair and pressed suits.
Our special guest will be Lawrence Modern’s Tim Hossler, associate professor and chairperson of KU’s design department. (As some may know, Tim is our in-house graphics designer who creates our event flyers.) As the former in-house art director for photographer Annie Leibovitz, Tim is as enthralled as any movie lover of North by Northwest’s iconic images and modernist design sensibility, which he will converse over with fellow Lawrence Modern cinephile and moderator Bill Steele.
Tickets can be purchased here or at the door for $10. The program will start promptly @7PM. Runtime is 2 hrs. 16 min. Get tickets now—the last show we did at the Microcinema, Vertigo, sold out!
Many thanks to the Lawrence Arts Center for their continued support of the Lawrence Modern film series.
North by Northwest 4K HD trailer | Criterion Collection review | LAC tickets | Tim Hossler bio
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