Spy: 166

North by Northwest (1959) is an American spy thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In New York City the following year, a waiter at the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room restaurant is asked by some thugs to page George Kaplan. Meanwhile, advertising executive Roger Thornhill calls over the same waiter and is mistakenly abducted as they believe he is Kaplan. He is then taken to Lester Townsend’s estate in Glen Cove where he is questioned by Phillip Vandamm, a Cold War spy working against the United States who is posing as Townsend. Vandamm orchestrates Thornhill’s supposed death in a staged ...

The British spy comedy film, Our Man in Havana (1959), was shot in CinemaScope and helmed by director and producer Carol Reed. Set in pre-revolutionary Cuba, the film follows James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited by Hawthorne of the British Secret Intelligence Service as their operative in Havana. Rather than recruiting actual agents, Wormold creates imaginary ones out of men he barely knows and fabricates plans for a rocket-launching pad using vacuum cleaner parts to impress the service and secure more funds for himself and his lavish daughter, Milly. As his importance increases, a secretary named ...

Notorious (1946) is an American spy film noir directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, featuring an all-star cast including Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains. In April 1946, Alicia Huberman is recruited by government agent T.R. Devlin to infiltrate a group of escaped Nazis in Brazil. Despite initial resistance from Alicia, Devlin persuades her to help by revealing recordings of her heated arguments with her father and professing her love for America. The two ...

The British espionage thriller film Sabotage (1936) follows a group of terrorists planning attacks in London. In one incident, sand is used to stop an electrical generator, causing a power outage at Karl Verloc’s cinema. When customers request their money back, Verloc sneaks into his living quarters and washes the sand from his hands before pretending to be asleep. He orders his wife to refund the money and mentions that he has other funds coming in. Just as refunds are about to be issued, the lights come back on. The following day, Verloc meets with his contact from an unnamed European country to discuss their plan for future attacks in London. The exact motive ...

Alfred Hitchcock’s espionage thriller film, Secret Agent (1936), is based on the play by Campbell Dixon. During World War I on 10 May 1916, British Captain and novelist Edgar Brodie returns from leave to discover his own obituary in the newspaper. He is then approached by an unknown man, ‘R’, who offers him a secret mission: to eliminate a German agent heading to Arabia with plans to cause chaos in the Middle East. Brodie agrees and is given a new identity as Richard Ashenden, along with a fake death. He is also partnered with an assassin known as ...

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, The 39 Steps (1935) is a gripping British spy thriller starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. Loosely based on the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, the film follows Richard Hannay as he witnesses gunshots at a London music hall theatre. Amidst the chaos, he finds himself with a frightened woman named Annabella Smith who reveals herself to be a spy. Claiming that she is being pursued by assassins, she convinces Hannay to ...