Ernest Lehman must have been a pretty smart guy -- not because he produced great screenplays, which he could, but because he managed to get paid twice for writing the same one. No, The Prize isn't literally a remake of North by Northwest. You can tell because of the generally inferior filmmaking. But it has so many scenes that seem plagiarized (yes, you can plagiarize from yourself if you don't acknowledge it), you'll roll your eyes. Paul Newman is a likable actor, but he's no Cary Grant, and while Elke Sommer is a sexy, lovely, charming woman, she's not given as much interesting to do as Eva Marie Saint was. Director Marc Robson more or less imitates Hitchcock, but he doesn't have the flair. You can tell an American directed the movie because it has an unrefined edge to it, like the difference between a Cadillac and a Rolls Royce. The story involves some hokum about a brilliant scientist being replaced with a doppelganger (both played by the great Edward G. Robinson, who gets too little screen time) while a smart-alecky womanizer (who somehow managed to win the Nobel Prize in literature!) gets pulled into the intrigue by mistake (in North by Northwest, he was an advertising man). There's little pretense of reality in this story. It's near impossible to believe Newman is a writer, let alone one of the caliber to win the Nobel Prize, and the spy goings on just seem tired. Watch it more as a curiosity, as Hollywood struggled to figure out how to get in on that 60s spy craze all the kids were just raging about.
