There is some odd slang involving cats, the more I think about it. Why “cat burglar”, for example? I found myself thinking this while watching the first scene of Hitchcock’s 1955 picture To Catch a Thief, in where we see a montage of items being stolen by such a sneak thief, interspersed with shots of a black cat walking on moonlit rooftops and the like, as if it had committed the crimes.
I don’t know if that was supposed to be the cat that belongs to Cary Grant’s character, but it sure looked like it. Grant didn’t lift any of this stuff, either. That isn’t a spoiler since, if he had, there wouldn’t be any mystery here.
Not that he is a pure soul. This reformed thief has been lying low in rural France after a bizarre set of circumstances in WWII led to his freedom. His former accomplices are also on parole because of the same odd arrangement afforded Grant. All of them seem to work in the same restaurant and hotel nearby. It think it would be funny if the U.S. witness protection program was as inept as this arrangement and just dumped all of the people it is trying to hide into one town.
Many of Grant’s former associates suspect him of falling back on old ways, as there has been a new wave of thefts committed using his methods. The police also regard him as their chief suspect, forcing him to find the true thief himself.
He ropes into his investigation a Lloyd’s of London agent (John Williams) who has a list those currently staying in the French Riviera who have the most valuable jewelry insured by his firm. Admittedly, he is reluctant to cooperate in any way with a previously prolific thief. Grant argues that everybody has been a thief to varying degrees, as he correctly guesses Williams has helped himself to a hotel ashtray or two in the past. I thought that to be some spurious logic, as I doubt Williams ever store a few thousand of them in one go.
One of the people on the list is Jessie Royce Landis, an oil widow who is vacationing with daughter Grace Kelly. It isn’t long before Grant and Kelly are romantically involved, and it is no surprise she is aware of his criminal past. Similarly, I was waiting for the moment her mother’s jewels will be stolen.
The lynchpin of this film is the romance between our leads and I found it odd that never really clicked for me. Sure, each actor is very good on their own, but I just didn’t feel a spark between them.
Part of the problem may be a weirdly clunky and disjointed script which doesn’t flow as effortlessly as the director’s best work from his period. It may have the leads, the look and the locations, but that sense of mid-century cool that defined such pictures as North by Northwest somehow eludes this particular production. I suspect a big problem may be the central mystery involves theft and not murder, and the lower stakes result in less intrigue.
I was instead far more interested in a potential romance between Grant and Brigette Auber. She plays the daughter of the hotel manager (Charles Vanel), who had been part of the former cat burglar’s crew. An odd coincidence is both Grant and Auber had previous real-life experience as trapeze artists.
My favorite performance in this is courtesy of Landis. With her usual droll humor, she steals every scene she’s in, just as she would in Northwest four years later, where she would play Grant’s mother (!). My favorite line of hers here is when she asks Grant what brought him to the Riviera, and he says it was to meet somebody as charming as her, prompting this response: “Boy, now I am going to have you investigated.”
I found some of the stylistic choices here interesting, as they feel like tryouts for similar touches in later films like Vertigo and Northwest. There are some curiously monochromatic bits, such as the night scenes being a uniform green. Everybody has heard of “day for night”, but this may be the only time I have seen “green for night”. Then there’s a surreally over-the-top montage of firework explosions as symbolism for the orgasms Grant and/or Kelly are experiencing when they final culminate their relationship. And we’re talking a lot of explosions.
To Catch a Thief has a couple of other elements which caught my attention, ones that are weirdly prescient. One is Hitchcock’s cameo, where he is on Grant’s left at the back of a bus. On Grant’s right is a woman with birds in a cage, seemingly a reference to The Birds, except that film was eight years in Hitchcock’s future. Then there’s a bit which had me cringing, as Kelly drives dangerously fast on the edge of a steep cliff. This wouldn’t have been so unnerving had it not been for her real-life death in 1982 when she experienced a hemorrhage while driving on a steep mountain road. Injuries incurred in the 120 foot descent resulted in her death.
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring Cary Grant, Grace Kelly
Watched as part of the blu-ray set Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection