North by Northwest: Manhattan to Mount Rushmore

A waiter calls out for George Kaplan in the Oak Room of the Plaza, and advertising executive Roger Thornhill, summoning the same waiter, is mistaken for him. Two well-dressed men kidnap him, and the wrong-man chase begins. Later Thornhill breaks into Kaplan's room upstairs. The bar scenes were mostly shot on a set, but the real Oak Room, built in 1907 as the hotel's bar room, has oak walls and frescoes of Bavarian castles. Cary Grant kept a room at the Plaza and used it during breaks in filming.

Thornhill heads to the General Assembly Building to meet Lester Townsend, who turns out to be a different man. One of the gang's thugs throws a knife into Townsend's back, and Thornhill is photographed grabbing at it, so he looks like the murderer. The UN refused permission to film, so the scene was shot illicitly: Hitchcock had Grant step out of a taxi while a hidden camera crew filmed him walking across the plaza. The UN did not give producers permission to film at its headquarters until 2005.

Fleeing the murder scene, Thornhill rushes to Grand Central and sneaks onto the 20th Century Limited, bound for Chicago, without a ticket. On board he meets Eve Kendall, who hides him from the police in her upper berth. The postwar diesel-powered 20th Century Limited trainset appeared in the film. Grand Central had opened in 1913, and its Main Concourse is usually filled with bustling crowds and is often used as a meeting place.

Visitor guidance: The Main Concourse is open to the public and is a classic New York meeting place.

Thornhill and Kendall arrive in Chicago at LaSalle Street Station. Here Kendall gives him the instructions for his meeting with Kaplan: a rural bus stop in Indiana. The station used as a film set was the one that opened on July 1, 1903. It stood until 1981, and only Metra's Rock Island District trains now use LaSalle, so the building on screen is gone, though trains still run from this spot.

Location precision: The 1903 station seen in the film was replaced after 1981, so the pin marks the site rather than the building on screen.

Thornhill arrives at a rural bus stop in Indiana and is attacked by a crop duster armed with a machine gun. Flushed out of a cornfield, he tries to stop a tanker truck, and the airplane crashes into it. The scene set in Indiana was actually filmed near Wasco, California, where Hitchcock added square signs to replicate those found in Indiana. The pilot was Bob Coe, a crop-duster from Wasco. Empire ranked it the greatest movie moment of all time in August 2009.

Location precision: The film places the scene in Indiana but shot it near Wasco, California; the pin marks the town of Wasco, not the exact field.

Back in Chicago, Thornhill parks a stolen truck outside the Ambassador East Hotel. At Kaplan's hotel he learns that Kaplan had checked out before the time Kendall claimed to have spoken with him. Hitchcock really stayed here: the crew occupied forty rooms, and the director took the Mediterranean Suite. The hotel on North State Parkway in the Gold Coast was established in 1926.

Hitchcock said he had always wanted to do a chase across Mount Rushmore. At the visitor center Kendall shoots Thornhill with blanks and flees, and in the finale the pair flee to the top of the monument, pursued while climbing down. The only place in the park where Hitchcock was permitted to film was the Memorial View Building, since demolished in 1994. Vandamm's cliff-top house was not a real structure. The four 60-foot-tall presidents' heads are still there.

Visitor guidance: The Presidential Trail is a 0.6-mile loop from the Visitor Center with close views of the sculpture.