Alfred Hitchcock (1955)
Alfred Hitchcock was very busy in the mid-1950s, with two films released in each of 1954 (Dial M for Murder, Rear Window), 1955 (To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry) and 1956 (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man). This romantic comedy-thriller, stronger in the romcom than the thrills department, opens with a shot of a travel agent’s window. Once the credits are done, the camera moves in to focus on a poster in the window announcing that, ‘If you love life, you’ll love FRANCE!’ What follows is certainly a good advertisement for the French Riviera. The God’s-eye view shots are mostly travelogue spectacle, though a car chase on a switchback road in the mountains above the Côte d’Azur is alarming enough. But Robert Burks’s cinematography (which won an Oscar) gives the Riviera good life real allure – on the beach, in the casino, throughout the de luxe hotels. Best of all is a sequence in a Nice flower market, which Hitchcock had specially created for the film. The size and vivid colours of the blooms – profuse enough for a man on the run to hide among – are exhilarating. In Britain, emerging from post-war austerity and where the film opened in cinemas late in the year, To Catch a Thief must have had strong escapist appeal.
The basic set-up is a familiar one in Hitchcock: a protagonist, accused of a crime he didn’t commit, shows nerve and resourcefulness to prove his innocence. In this case, there’s the added complication that the fellow in question used to break the law in just the way he’s suspected of doing now. John Robie (Cary Grant), an American expatriate in Europe, was once a notorious jewel thief – ‘the Cat’. After working for the French Resistance during World War II, confirmed bachelor Robie has supposedly retired to tend vines and plants in his hilltop villa. Recent jewel thefts in Riviera hotel rooms, however, look like the Cat’s work. In the first scene in which he appears, Robie is forced to give local police the slip – assisted by his housekeeper (Georgette Anys), he ingeniously succeeds and makes his way to a restaurant. The place is staffed by his former partners, in crime and during the War: Bertani (Charles Vanel), Foussard (Jean Martinelli) et al have been paroled in recognition of their Resistance efforts and can work in the restaurant for as long as they keep their noses clean. With the Cat evidently back in business, they’re not happy that, along with Robie, they too are back under suspicion. When the flics arrive at the restaurant, Foussard’s daughter Danielle (Brigitte Auber), who has a crush on Robie, helps him escape.
Set a thief to catch a thief: the hero determines to unmask the Cat at the scene of a crime. He enlists the initially reluctant help of H H Hughson (John Williams), a Lloyds of London man, who supplies a list of the Riviera hotel guests whose jewels are most highly insured. They include an American widow Jessie Stevens (Jessie Royce Landis) and her daughter Frances (Grace Kelly). They’re nouveau riche – oil was found on their land shortly after the death of Jessie’s late lamented husband – but Frances has been to continental finishing school and it shows, rather to her mother’s irritation. Reckoning the Stevenses will be among the Cat’s prime targets, Robie, posing as a wealthy American tourist, cultivates their acquaintance. Mrs Stevens takes an immediate shine to him. Her daughter’s demure reserve is short-lived. Frances and Robie are soon swimming and driving together, exchanging kisses and repartee.
To Catch a Thief is self-consciously superior and undemanding entertainment. The script by John Michael Hayes (a regular Hitchcock scenarist at the time), adapted from a 1951 novel of the same name by David Dodge, majors in smart, arch dialogue at the expense of intriguing plot. Lyn Murray’s score keeps telling us whether the action on screen is amusing or exciting; sometimes, this musical assistance isn’t as superfluous as it should be. The comedy of humiliating the dim-witted police chief (René Blancard) and his colleagues is pretty strenuous. There are good supporting performances from Brigitte Auber and John Williams (unlikely though this seems when Hughson first appears on the scene) but it’s fortunate the film is more or less the Cary Grant show.
Temperamentally perfect for the role, Grant is also in admirably good physical shape for a man in his fifties in the 1950s. He is, in every sense, light on his feet. Literally so, for a start: his easy movement makes him a plausible cat burglar (Robie shares his villa with a black cat, who contributes nicely to the feline pas de deux). He’s so vocally agile that his side of the prolonged verbal sparring with Frances never palls. He’s emotionally supple: Grant doesn’t make the blunt mood distinctions that the music does – everything feels integrated and natural. As a romantic partner, he is – as he typically is at his best – a charming wag who’s basically a gentleman. He’s unthreatening without being innocuous.
When Robie says to Frances, ‘Don’t sound so pleased with yourself’, it’s tempting to murmur ‘hear hear’. Grace Kelly is proficient – and successfully complementary to Grant – but the combination of her flawless looks and assured readings makes Frances rather boringly impregnable. Robie also suggests at one point that she’s ‘an insecure, pampered woman, accustomed to attracting men. You’re not sure whether they’re attracted to you or your money’. That sets you wondering if the character’s poise is more willed than intrinsic but I didn’t get beyond deciding that the performer’s poise was a pose. Although Cary Grant’s speech is highly idiosyncratic, it’s Grace Kelly who sounds as if she’s putting a voice on. There’s more fun and rhythm in the playing of Jessie Royce Landis. Hitchcock wasn’t the most alert to acting quality but he clearly saw the spark between Landis and Grant. In North by Northwest (1959), she plays his mother and convincingly, even though she was actually only eight years his senior.
This film isn’t nearly as good as North by Northwest – where, although the material is essentially light-hearted, there’s a better plot and more at stake. The big suspense set-piece in To Catch a Thief is a grand costume ball that builds effectively to the rooftop showdown between the Cats past and present. For the story to mean anything, however, there’s only one candidate for being the new Cat – that is, the only person, apart from the two leads, with a substantial emotional investment in the situation. As a result, the eventual unmasking of Danielle (working in cahoots with Bertani and, until he went west in an earlier high-altitude encounter with Robie, her father) is an anti-climax. It’s upstaged by another revelation, when Jessie and Frances’s male companion at the costume ball removes his Blackamoor mask and turns out to be not Robie but Hughson (it was Robie at an earlier stage: Hughson dons the disguise to let him leave the ball and get up to the roof). There was a sharper intake of breath in NFT3 when Hughson showed his face than when Danielle did. Mind you, there was an even sharper one when the Moor attendant entered the ballroom in the first place. This BFI screening coincided with news breaking of the Justin Trudeau blackface scandal.
20 September 2019
