This movie has the two iconic scenes -- Man being chased by crop duster plane, and couple being chased on the top of Mt. Rushmore. That probably is enough to give it at least 4 stars. What about the rest of the movie?
Roger (Cary Grant) is just a typical New York dude. Somehow -- never explained in the movie -- the bad guys come to believe that he's someone else. That someone else is a Cold War undercover agent. Turns out this agent isn't even real.
By the way, the crop-dusting scene is supposed to take place in Indiana, just 90 minutes away from Chicago. It's a completely barren and flat landscape. No trees. I'm pretty sure none of Indiana actually looks like that. Maybe it could pass for parts of Kansas, but I'm not sure. In fact, the scene was shot in central California. Regardless, it's a cool scene.
And about the femme fatal: The movie really makes us think about Eve's ethics (Eva Marie Saint). She knew she was sending Roger to his doom, but in her position, what choice did she have, I guess? Must be the ultimate trolley car experiment. She's a double agent, and her job is ultimately to protect Americans from the bad guys, but here she has to allow the bad guys to kill an American.
I wonder, too, how Eve's character got by the censors. She's the mistress of the bad guy. She's doing things that mistresses do. The censors were okay with that? Did they allow it simply because she's a patriot, sacrificing her body to America just as any good solider would do, just in a more feminine way?
By the way, if the bad guys are so interested in Roger, or who they think he is, why would they simply try to kill him? Don't they want him alive?
And talk about being interested in Roger, the dude is a babe magnet. Eve falls for him from the start, and the flirting in this movie may be the least subtle of any Hitchcock film up to this point. They're basically having word sex throughout the film. But the one scene that really made me laugh was when Roger is being chased and runs through a random woman's rooms. First she cries out "Stop!" in a frightened fashion, but a split second later when she gets a look at Roger, she repeats the word, but in a pleading, wanting way: "Stop?"
I'm sure a lot of the flirting and romance got passed the censors because Eve is a "good American patriot," but it doesn't hurt that she and Roger end up getting married. Now, I hate to keep saying that every Hitchcock ending is problematic at best and weak at worst, but he always seems to go for a cheap laugh, maybe so the audience can leave the theater with a light-hearted laugh. But the weakness in this ending is: Are the bad guys just going to forget about Roger? Is he really going to be able to go back to New York and live his former life as though noting has happened? Has his involvement with the UN assassination somehow magically been cleared up? And more importantly, are there no more bad guys who will come after him.
And Eve. If she marries Roger, is she giving up being a government agent? If she outs herself like that, wouldn't the bad guys still be after her too? In other words, I have questions, and the quick ending doesn't resolve them.
Like the Jimmy Stewart character in Vertigo, Eve is also left hanging. In both films, Hitchcock simply cuts to the next scene, and we never see how the person hanging manages to be pulled up. Can Roger honestly pull her up to safety? Maybe, but the Vertigo scene still really bothers me, because there's no one to help, and Scottie somehow needed to pull himself up on that very angled roof without pulling the gutters off in the process.
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