PG-13

All the "mature themes" stuff in the film comes from its sexual innuendo. North by Northwest features some pretty seriously steamy scenes for a film made in 1959. (Then again, this was also the year of the deeply weird sexual psychodrama Suddenly, Last Summer.) We thought of giving it an "R" but remembered that the Twilight saga, with its vampire-on-human action, was a PG-13. In NXNW, everyone's human, and they all keep their clothes on. Anyway, there's some serious making out just after Thornhill and Eve make one another's acquaintance. Other scenes stop at innuendo—hinting, for instance, at Leonard's sexual orientation.

For a spy thriller, there's only a drop of blood—and it's fake. A knife in the back, a fall off a cliff—no gore, no extended fighting. People died pretty bloodlessly in films back in the 1950s.