North by Northwest

North by Northwest is a 1959 American film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant as an advertising executive mistaken for a government agent by foreign spies and pursued across the United States while trying to clear his name. The film is built around a sequence of celebrated set pieces, including an attack by a crop-dusting plane in an open field and a climactic chase across the carved stone faces of Mount Rushmore, staged with an elaborate scale unusual for a suspense thriller of its time. North by Northwest is widely regarded as one of Hitchcock's finest films and as a defining template for the wrongly accused man thriller that later spy and action films frequently drew on.