Nail-Biting Allowed: Alfred Hitchcock’s 10 Most Memorable Scenes

The beauty of this scene is the genuine sense of menace that pervades what in lesser hands might have come across as a cartoonish interlude. A guy in a suit steps off a bus in the middle of nowhere. An anonymous pilot in a cropduster tries repeatedly to kill him (strafing him with machine-gun fire, no less). That simple proposition is brought to thrilling life — and an absolutely perfect conclusion in what may be Hitch’s most thoroughly entertaining film — by the director’s mastery of tension and by the simple pleasure of watching Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) transition so marvelously from detached bemusement to outraged shock to primal, running-for-his-life fear.

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