<P> Film critic Charles Champlin saw the film as an "anthology of typical Hitchcockian situations", and was particularly taken by the scene and suspense in which Grant's character avoids death when attacked by a crop - dusting plane in the cornfields, which he believed was representative of Hitchcock's finest work . </P> <P> The London edition of Time Out magazine, reviewing the film nearly a half - century after its initial release, commented: </P> <P> Fifty years on, you could say that Hitchcock's sleek, wry, paranoid thriller caught the zeitgeist perfectly: Cold War shadiness, secret agents of power, urbane modernism, the ant - like bustle of city life, and a hint of dread behind the sharp suits of affluence . Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill, the film's sharply dressed ad exec who is sucked into a vortex of mistaken identity, certainly wouldn't be out of place in Mad Men . But there's nothing dated about this perfect storm of talent, from Hitchcock and Grant to writer Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success), co-stars James Mason and Eva Marie Saint, composer Bernard Herrmann and even designer Saul Bass, whose opening - credits sequence still manages to send a shiver down the spine . </P> <P> Author and journalist Nick Clooney praised Lehman's original story and sophisticated dialogue, calling the film "certainly Alfred Hitchcock's most stylish thriller, if not his best". </P>

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