There is inevitably the romantic complication, which also inevitably leads to the love scene. But, only to a point...
Now, I could make a joke about how Hitchcock stages these things, but Hitchcock would have made a remark saying it was "impertinent" while secretly smiling at it. Hitch loved dirty jokes.
Hitchcock was the Master of Suspense, and, for him, that even applied to his love scenes. "Sex on the screen should be suspenseful," he said, and he would push the tension—the sexual tension—as far as the censors would let him (bearing in mind this was 1958).
As Hitchcock was as much a voyeur as his audience, he would play his love scenes close and with complications. He had, Notorious-ly, staged "The longest screen kiss" between Grant and Ingrid Bergman that lasted whole minutes on the screen, making the camera—and us—a third wheel in their love-making around an apartment setting, and then there was that moment where he set-up Grace Kelly's unexpectedly aggressive kiss in To Catch a Thief.
Here, things are just as complicated: the setting is small (a train compartment), supposedly moving (although the shots are rock-steady), and it's a wide-screen format—Vistavision!—that must somehow contain the 6 foot Grant and the 5'4" Eva Marie Saint at a level smooching angle. It's an odd acrobatic-looking scene—sometimes he's dominant in the scene and sometimes she is, as they roll along the compartment wall while still on their feet—suggesting nothing so much as changing positions and awkwardness, and full of double entendres and leering PG innuendo.
And why the hands touching the hair? Probably it was a censorship note suggesting that—since the shots are consistently from the shoulders up—we see the participants hands, lest there be some implied off-screen hanky-panky. It also sets up a nifty call-back later in the film at another meeting between Roger Thornhill and Eve Kendall, where, as she genuinely hugs him, his suspicions of her betrays him as his arms hang in the air, doubtful of whether to fully embrace her.
And, of course, all the talk and the touching and situation leads one—us and Grant—to think that these two strangers on a train (Hitchcock cut the line containing the title of one of his movies) are going to sleep together. The verbal punch-line of the scene is that it's not going to happen. The visual punch-line is that Eve knows more than she's letting on.
And although he's safely hidden in her cabin, his problems are far from over.
The Set-Up: Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant), Madison Avenue Executive, has been been mistaken by a spy ring as George Kaplan, American spy. He's nearly been killed twice in this case of "mistaken identity," force-fed bourbon and intended to be tossed off a mountain road, and then, almost knifed at the U.N.—a move that, instead, kills an innocent diplomat, an assassination that Thornhill is accused of. Running from the police...and the spies, he boards the 20th Century train for Chicago, where he meets a mysterious woman, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who seems to know all about him, and who offers her compartment to hide him from investigating detectives.
It doesn't occur to Thornhill that this all seems a little too convenient, but then Eve keeps him preoccupied with a seduction that seems to be going somewhere, except that the train doesn't seem to be approaching a tunnel anytime soon.
Action.
THORNHILL
What's happening to us?
(tasting her)
A PORTER is standing
there.
As the porter opens a lower berth and starts
making up the bed, Eve takes up her handbag
and says, for Thornhill's benefit.
PORTER Thank you.
She starts to open her handbag as she goes out
to the corridor.
and looks from it to himself in the mirror with
blank expression. He gives a casual half turn
as he HEARS the VOICES of Eve and the porter.
(she looks up at him) 
EVE
...are going to sleep on the floor...
Words by Ernest Lehman
Pictures by Robert Burks and Alfred Hitchcock
North By Northwest is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from M-G-M Home Video.
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