Hitchcock started his movie career in silent films, where pictures had to tell the story. He thought that something was lost in cinematic technique when sound arrived to films, and he said he used dialogue only as a last resort when pictures couldn't do the job. "[W]e don't have pages to fill, or pages from a typewriter to fill, we have a rectangular screen in a movie house," he told an interviewer (source).

And boy could he fill it.

When you think of his films, you think of all those memorable visuals—the shower scene in Psycho, the man falling off the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur. No words necessary.

NXNW has two of Hitch's most impressive examples of this kind of visual storytelling. It includes probably the most copied and parodied scene in film history: the uber-famous crop duster sequence where Thornhill is dumped in the middle of nowhere in broad daylight in his beautiful tailored suit and he has no idea what's going on. All we see for six minutes or so is nothingness—the wide open prairie, no music, no dialogue. Then the plane starts to buzz around but he still has no clue about what's about to happen. Finally, it attacks, and the actor manages to convey all the panic and terror without single word of dialogue.

The other sequence is the chase across Mount Rushmore, with the characters scrambling around this unlikely setting and nearly falling to their deaths. This is pure visual storytelling, using long shots to establish the scene and close-ups to convey emotion.

Here's an exercise—watch the film with the sound off and see how much of the action you understand.

We bet you'd be surprised.