At an early stage in the preparation of the screenplay for North by Northwest (1959), the screenwriter Ernest Lehman summarised his ambition in the following laconic statement: ‘All I want to do’, he said, ‘is write the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.’ Asked by the director what such a film would entail, he replied: ‘Something with wit, glamor, sophistication, suspense, many different colorful locals, a real movie movie’ (Lehman 1999: vii). As if following Lehman's wish for a film that would sum up Hitchcock's previous work in a retrospective homage, the voyage undertaken by North by Northwest revisits many of the recurrent elements composing his universe. His selfcitations include, among others, the mistaken identity of the protagonist, a series of iconic sites and national monuments as well as the rite de passage of the romantic couple in conjunction with an espionage plot. Typical of Hitchcock's romantic spy thrillers is also the chase after a red herring or, in Hitchcock's coinage, a ‘MacGuffin’, which serves as a pretext structuring the quest narrative and leading to the formation of the couple. Drawing on the idea of the MacGuffin as an empty decoy, the film never discloses the content of the government secret which the foreign spies are about to transport beyond the American border. Instead, when the cryptic statuette is broken in the climactic scene on Mount Rushmore, Hitchcock has it reveal a roll of microfilm.