One of Hitchcock's 3 or 4 best. The story is a representation of one of Hitch's most prevalent themes in his work-the innocent man wrongly accused. Cary Grant is never better than in this film as the socialite who is mistaken for a spy and gets embroiled in a bad situation. Eva-Marie Saint is also very good at filling in the customary "Hitchcock blonde". James Mason is great at being subtly bad, and he goes out on a great closing line. Martin Landau is just plain creepy as the murderous henchman. The crop-duster scene is one of the great images in cinema, and the final shot (a train going into a tunnel) is so brilliantly heavy in the innuendo department that I wonder how Hitch got away with it in 1959. Not as deep or as talked-about as "Vertigo", but this film is still one of the Great Films, and it is the ultimate adventure-thriller film.
