according to Lehman, "We never did find a [better] title." The Northwest Airlines reference in the film plays on the title. The film's plot involves a "MacGuffin"—a term popularized by Hitchcock—which is a physical object that everyone in the film is chasing, but which has no deep relationship to the plot. Late in North by Northwest, it emerges that the spies are attempting to smuggle microfilm containing government secrets out of the country. They have been trying to kill Thornhill, whom they believe to be the agent on their trail, "George Kaplan".North by Northwest has been referred to as "the first James Bond film" because of its splashily colorful settings, secret agents, and an elegant, daring, wisecracking leading man opposite a sinister yet strangely charming villain. The crop-duster scene inspired the helicopter chase in From Russia with Love. The film's final shot—that of the train speeding into a tunnel during a romantic embrace onboard—is a famous bit of self-conscious Freudian symbolism reflecting Hitchcock's mischievous sense of humor. In the book Hitchcock/Truffaut (p. 107–108), Hitchcock called it a "phallic symbol ... probably one of the most impudent shots I ever made". Influences The film was very influential on the James Bond movies and subsequent action-thriller films, as well as the TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., where Leo G. Carroll played the same sort of role as the head of a top secret intelligence agency. The film's title is reported to have been the influence for the name of the popular annual live-music festival South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, started in 1987, with the name idea coming from Louis Black, editor and co-founder of the local alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle, as a play on the Hitchcock film title. The third episode of the Doctor Who serial "The Deadly Assassin" (1976) includes an homage to North by Northwest, when the Doctor, who like Hitchcock's hero is falsely accused of a politically motivated murder, is attacked by gunfire from a biplane piloted by one of his enemy's henchmen. The 2010 Spanish dark comedy film The Last Circus pays visual homage to the Mount Rushmore scene in its climactic scene atop a controversial Francoist monument."«Balada Triste de Trompeta», triste es poco," Extracine (Dec. 2010). Retrieved April 15, 2021. Adaptations North by Northwest was adapted as a stage play by Carolyn Burns. The adaptation premiered at the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2015. See