‘North by Northwest’ plays on Jan. 18 at the Sebastiani Theater

With “North by Northwest” Alfred Hitchcock gives us something we can’t imagine the history of cinema without: Roger O. Thornhill’s grey glen check suit. OK, the actor in the suit, Cary Grant, is rather indispensible too. Thornhill is a thoroughly Hitchcockian hero, an ad man turned wrong man by a frame job that precipitates a cross-country lark.

But back to the suit – the true horror of the famous scene where a malevolent crop duster stoops at Grant is that the pratfalls muss his single-breasted jacket. In spite of all manner of threat, one can’t really imagine Thornhill getting shot because that would put a hole or two in his attire. One envies the fact we don’t live in the movies in 1959, where excellent express pressing services were available from Long Island police stations to swank Chicago hotels to transcontinental boxcars.

On the lam, Thornhill has a two-step train corridor “meet cute” with Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), smitten in an instant by her cool water voice and ravishing monochromatic stylishness. They retire to her sleeping quarters for the inevitable kisses and double entendres, “What can a man do with his clothes off for 20 minutes?” “You could always take a cold shower.”

Thornhill never grows a beard as a disguise because, regardless of his character’s worries, it would be inappropriate for Cary Grant to ever appear with stubble (it is an immense pleasure to watch him examine, then shave with Eve’s minuscule travel razor). He wears the same suit that’s on the front page of every newspaper in country proclaiming him a murderer because his goal isn’t to go incognito – it’s to look so good no one would have the temerity to question him.

The film as a giddy pit stop for screenwriter Ernest Lehman on his acerbic progression from “The Sweet Smell of Success” to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He mostly lets Cary Grant be Cary Grant, but tucks into some succulent supporting roles. In the first half there’s Jessie Royce Landis (an actress the same age as Grant but playing his mother) scolding her boy as you might a charmingly disobedient demigod. In the second half, there’s rogue spy James Mason, hopelessly outclassed in his tweeds and button-up sweater vests, but putting as much clipped menace as he can into his plummy accent.

To watch the film is to see its continual influence on contemporary cinema (the train scene in “Spectre” being one recent example) as directors attempt to match Hitchcock’s sense of visual play. Note the adventurous crane shots at national landmarks like the UN Plaza and Mount Rushmore – he turns man’s grandest designs into the simplest of abstractions across which Cary Grant dashes.

“North by Northwest” wears so well it’ll never fall out of the American repertoire of great films. When Hitch packs Grant and Saint off on the 20th Century Limited, the train runs on timelessness.

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“North by Northwest” is showing at the Sebastiani Theatre on Jan. 18 at 7 pm. Not rated. Running time 2:16. Visit sebastianitheatre.com.