Start it up for me and tell me I'm wrong! If you aren't impressed by Cary's drunk getaway scene, try to resist due diligence, quit there and watch something better instead.
I finally got around to this this weekend.
And I can see what you're getting at, I have to admit
North By Northwest (1959) hasn't aged particularly well. At it's time it would have been very fresh and exciting with all the latest technology and stunts on show; full colour, still a relative rarity in 1959, the big name stars of Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint before you even get to the quality support from James Mason, Martin Landau and Leo G Carroll, the seemingly death defying stunts and explosions, all the exotic locations, $4m spent on budget before the rigorous and saturating advertising campaign.
But looking upon it now, from modern eyes, it plays very much like an alpha James Bond movie. And a lot of people do refer to it in the same breath as the Bond movies. Which is all well and good, but people don't watch Hitchcock for Bond movies, they watch them for suspense, and there's very little suspense here as one spends more time wondering about the plot holes than any chair-arm gripping tension.
You ask why a different lead wasn't chosen and that you think Grant is a bit weak in the lead role, probably your main complaint, and it does say in the special features that James Stewart was going to be the original lead before Grant, which probably makes more sense. And I agree that Grant is a bit hard to watch at times and does lack something chemistry-wise and sincerity-wise.
However, you ask why someone like Connery wasn't chosen, but you forget Connery wasn't on anyone's radar in 1958, he wasn't even a nearly leading man by that point. And that Cary Grant was the original 1st choice for Bond, Connery only getting the role as 3rd or 4th choice, maybe even further down the line than that. So, again, for the time, Grant was probably the right choice for people's expectations at the time.
I found the film was too long generally for the plot, at just over 2 hours I really started feeling it towards the end. I did enjoy it though, generally. I made it through without nodding off quite easily and there's a lot of nice stuff on show, from great shots to wonderful period-piece nostalgia.
Like a lot of 1950s films it's a bit of a transitory piece, with one foot in old Hollywood and one foot in the modern era of cinema. It's an almost perfect amalgam of a 1940s Humphrey Bogart film noir and a 1960s cheesy Bond film. What it isn't though is a classic Hitchcock movie. If he wasn't so obviously the director then I should think many people would never guess it was one of his, even though many people do now refer to it as a quintessential Hitchcock classic.
It's my fascination with the above that enables me to enjoy this kind of film to a greater extent than if it had been a random other film watched in exclusion of context. There's so much more here to read into it than it's face value of just another dumb summer blockbuster. There's far too much quality on show for the film to be completely forgotten or derided. Particularly if you view it as the film that spawned the entire 1960s spy genre.
However, I think it's current 8.3/10 ranking on IMDB takes too much of this into consideration as, by modern eyes, it's almost impossible to watch it today without constantly noticing every single back projection and obvious set. So much suspension of reality is required to pretend to yourself you can't see any of it that it makes Star Trek sets look like genuinely inter-planetary sets. And while this can be ok in some genres, in a genre where globe-trotting is half the appeal, it really detracts more than it otherwise might.
7.3/10