"A thousand crisscrossing fictions"

"Picture Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller 'North by Northwest' being hustled out of the hotel and into the back seat of a parked car by two goons, having been mistaken for another man. 'Don’t tell me where we’re going,' Grant quips. 'Surprise me.' The car peels away and we are swiftly sealed in another world, our familiar surroundings receding in the rear-view mirror.

"Standing at the same corner half a century later, it’s not hard to feel a curious dissonance between the two places. There’s the tangible New York of concrete and smog, and there’s what the film historian James Sanders has called the 'mythic New York,' the dreamy celluloid landscape of a thousand crisscrossing fictions."

(The New York Times)