protagonist Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant — a playboy ad executive who lands himself in trouble when he is mistaken for a spy and kidnapped, throwing his life into chaos and a huge mess as he plays an increasingly dangerous game of cat and mouse with his abductors and the authorities. It’s only because of this game that he meets Eve Kendall, played by Eva Marie Saint, a love interest who twice helps him evade capture.
North by Northwest is often credited as being the first sequence to use kinetic type — or simply, type in motion. It is also one of the first examples of situational type in film, where the text is integrated into the environment by matching its perspective, a technique famously revisited by Picture Mill for David Fincher’s Panic Room in 2002.
Although Bass was already an established designer by 1959, North by North west is likely his first truly modernist title sequence, adopting a clean, minimal style and a veneer of graphic sophistication previously unseen in his title work or elsewhere in mainstream film. It’s a style that he carried into his next two projects, Psycho and Ocean’s Eleven, and would revisit almost 30 years later for Good fella's in 1990.
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