At a Lincoln Center retrospective of his films in New York in 1974, fabled director François Truffaut introduced two brilliant Hitchcock sequences: the clash of the cymbals in The Man Who Knew Too Much; and the low-flying plane attack (left) on Cary Grant in North By Northwest.
Both have always been critically rated among the greatest sequences ever filmed.

Truffaut, reflecting on Hitchcock's uniqueness, summed it up superbly: 'It was impossible not to see that the love scenes were filmed like murder scenes, and the murder scenes like love scenes...

'It occurred to me that, in Hitchcock's cinema, to make love and to die are one and the same.'