***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Jessie Royce Landis, and John Williams
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock & written for the screen by John Michael Hayes, from the novel by David Dodge
1955
106 min NR
It’s Hitchcock’s favorite theme: we’re naughty and we’re guilty and there’s no way out of who we are. A reformed jewel thief spends the entire movie saying “I don’t steal!” to police, old accomplices, and his love interest. But where does he end up in the last ten minutes of the movie? On a rooftop, dressed in black. It’s a brilliant shot: he’s high in the shadows, crouched behind a chimney, resigned, guilty, and surrounded by sin. And we’ve been waiting for him to be there since the beginning of the movie.
To make matters worse, an icy blonde, oozing sex on everything she touches, finds out the thief’s dark secret. For sport, she talks up robbery like it’s the most wildly permissive and depraved sex act. It’s the old story: a sinner tries to go straight, only the girl of his dreams is so enthralled by his sins that she won’t let him.
The big sin isn’t stealing so much as coveting. “To Catch a Thief” is a classically Catholic (or is it Marxist?) fable about how all the stuff we want is bad for us—but we want it so much! The French Riviera is positively sopping with casual opulence. The Oscar-winning photography is shot in “Vistavision,” and is delicious to the point of obscenity in its sugar-coated candy store colors. God only knows how many gowns and dresses Edith Head made for Grace Kelly, and there’s even an 18th century costume ball. All the fireworks, aerial shots, diamonds, villas, architecture, coastal vistas, casinos, and hotels are photographed so lovingly because they are what “To Catch a Thief” is really about. Because beware, just beneath the surface of all that luxury is decadence, phoniness, and envy.
The robber is a robber because he wants fine wine, quiche, flowers, and to live in a villa high in the sky. (“Don’t you like the word ‘affluence?’” someone asks.) The widow who fondly recalls her husband in the first act calls him a “swindler” in the second, and the insurance agent is called a gambler as he ends up in cahoots with a jewel thief. The hero (a suntanned Cary Grant) may live in a “travel-book fantasy” but he’s a reformed criminal, with no less than 72 kills from his days in the Resistance. Even his maid strangled Germans during the war. His background makes for good reading: imprisoned during the war, he joined the Resistance only after bombers inadvertently set him free. His motive? To even up his moral deposits with his withdrawals. Is his conscience clear, years later? He says so, but we’re never sure. He has gone years without sinning and denies vehemently that he is the acrobatic burglar known as The Cat. He comes out of retirement when a copycat thief starts closing a frame around him. He wants to get the real culprit before the police get him.
Along the way, Cary Grant meets a rich bitch (Grace Kelly) so jaded that she takes to toying with him. Their courtship, when not dripping with double entendres, is marked by exchanges such as these:
“You’re in Europe to buy a husband.”
“The man I want can’t be bought at any price.”
“That rules me out.”
In typical Hitchcock style, the investigation is the maguffin and the rich girl is the real deal. When it comes to the whodunit, we half-know who did it early on, and half-don’t know exactly what was going on by the end. The steps in the investigation are simple ones. Hitchcock further distills mystery conventions in “Vertigo;” more important than the explanation is the feeling that the hero is the pawn of powers larger than he can fully comprehend. As for the romance, it is Cary Grant, the ex-crook, who has a moral compass, while the girl with the clean record is so pampered and spoiled that she thinks she’s above bourgeois nonsense like ethics. She figures out who Cary used to be and he becomes a great piece of sport for her, while she leans over furniture in low dresses with diamond encrusted cleavage. She’s the cat and he’s the mouse. She’s not a million miles away from Ray Milland’s uppercrust villain in “Dial M for Murder,” and, boy, is the game a lot less fun for her when it’s her baubles that are stolen.
The final rooftop chase is probably the direct inspiration for some of the night shadows in Shyamalan’s “Signs,” more than 4 decades later. Hitchcock is joined by many of his favorite actors and crew: Grace’s mother, who is at least as eager to bed Cary Grant as Grace is, is played by Jessie Royce Landis, who plays Cary’s mother in “North by Northwest.” The insurance agent (John Williams) is the veddy-British investigator in “Dial M.” Many of Hitch’s favorite themes are also present: there is a domineering and critical mother figure, the ice blonde, the innocent man wrongfully accused, the fear of heights, the love-hate relationship with opulence, and plutocrats who figure they’re above the law. As is usually the case in Hitchcock, the wrongfully accused man may be innocent of his current crime, but he feels guilty about living in a villa while his old Resistance buddies slave in a restaurant, and he fears that everyone telling him he is a criminal may be right. Maybe Hitchcock’s fame has endured for so long precisely because he tells us what we don’t want to hear.
Finished Saturday, April 30th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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