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Alfred Hitchcock was a pioneer of numerous things in film and will forever be regarded as one of the most innovative and experimental directors of all time. North By Northwest (1959) is sometimes colloquially referred to as the “first James Bond film” because, without knowing it, the film set a precedent for secret agents, dangerous and beautiful women, suggestive dialogue, double-crossers, flashy cars, explosions, and a maguffin carrying a simple plot across epic sets that would define action films through modern day. Those descriptors apply to almost every action film you can think of, from Dr. No (1962) to The Bourne Quadrilogy

As The Guardian recalls,

“Ian Fleming originally wanted [Cary] Grant to play 007 in Dr. No, and North By Northwest surely had a lot to do with that. 1959 was also the year Fleming published Goldfinger (1964), the first truly ridiculous Bond novel (delightful though it is), which, as the third Bond movie, would perfect the NXNW-style template from which the series would barely deviate until the advent of Daniel Craig.”

The famous cropduster scene from North By Northwest directly inspired a very similar scene in 1963’s Bond film From Russia With Love, where Sean Connery is outmaneuvering a helicopter attempting to do away with him in a familiar fly-by style.

“When Hollywood went all blockbuster-minded in the 1980s, this was the kind of structure - all thrills, no brains - it came to rate most highly. Sequences in Bond movies and the action movies that came to imitate them - Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Jack Ryan movies and everything since - are as tenuously joined to each other as theme-park rides, separate, intense experiences strung together with the merest soupçon of plot coherence or narrative plausibility.”