North by North-West

Star Wars III is history now. Let us take a deep breath and look at the
past again to bring to you some golden memories.

At a Lincoln Center retrospective of his films in New York in 1974, the
fabled director François Truffaut introduced two brilliant sequences from
Hitchcock films: the clash of the cymbals in The Man Who Knew Too
Much; and the low-flying plane attack on Cary Grant in North By
Northwest. Both of these breath-taking sequences have always been
critically rated among the greatest ones ever filmed.

Truffaut, reflecting on Hitchcock's uniqueness, summed it up in his usual
excellent way: 'It was impossible not to see that the love scenes were
filmed like murder scenes, and the murder scenes like love scenes...
It occurred to me that, in Hitchcock's cinema, to make love and to die are
one and the same.'