The Epitome of Glamour...and One of Hitchcock's Best

So there.

If you were looking to find the polar opposite of "Psycho" in the Hitchcock canon, I think "To Catch a Thief" might just be the ticket.

Whereas the characters in "Psycho" are workaday, hardscrabble types (they manage barely profitable motels and hardware stores, work as secretaries, etc), the characters in "To Catch A Thief" are generally rich, and/or surrounded by the rich.

"Psycho" was cheaply made in black-and-white almost entirely on the Universal backlot (for Paramount). "To Catch a Thief" was made in Technicolor and VistaVision on the gorgeous French Riviera, with Hitchcock's favorite cinematographer, Robert Burks, winning his only Oscar for showing us a mouth-watering Monaco, a night sky full of fireworks, the eye-popping golden gowns and other clotes of a costume ball.

"To Catch A Thief" came out five years before "Psycho," and "Psycho" was largely seen as a shocking rejection of the glamour that "To Catch A Thief" portrayed. Maybe it was -- the sixties would slowly drain glamour out of the movies and the movie stars.

In which case, "To Catch A Thief" is all the more rare a gem in the Hitchcock collection -- a standing monument to a time long gone and a lifestyle that the "new rich" have not carried on.

Objections include "it's not much of a thriller" and "it's not as exciting and action-packed as 'North by Northwest'" of four years later.

Granted, granted. But "To Catch A Thief" stands tall far more as a romantic comedy in the Lubitsch tradition than a thriller -- even though it does thrill.

And "North by Northwest" -- which was meant as the big budget "Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures" isn't as glamourous as "To Catch a Thief," and is an "All-American thriller" to boot.

Also, Eva Marie Saint, good actress and beauty that she is, is not Grace Kelly.

"To Catch A Thief" offers us Cary Grant looking about as good as he ever did -- 50 but much younger-looking, tan, fit enough for swim trunks -- paired with Grace Kelly looking about as gorgeous as SHE ever did -- parrying and thrusting all over the French Riviera looking as gorgeous as IT ever did. And that's almost enough to justify the whole movie.

Cary had "retired" in his forties, feeling that the Marlon Brandos, James Deans, and even William Holdens were replacing his Golden Era elegance.

But Hitchocck lured Grant out of that premature retirement, with two things: a character who fit Cary like a glove, and the prospect of working with Grace Kelly. Cary called Grace his favorite leading lady; and you can see why. They are a perfect pair here. One movie earlier in "Rear Window," Grace had been paired with Jimmy Stewart in an "opposites attract" kind of thing. But with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, their gorgeous bodies match, their smooth voices match, their elegant ways match. It's perfection.

But wait, there's more!

If "Notorious" perfected the "black and white 40's noir look" with a younger,more studly Cary Grant and an exotic Ingrid Bergman, "To Catch A Thief" perfected the "50's Technicolor look," with Grant and Kelly a perfect match of a different sort, in a movie designed, like so many others of the 50's, to battle the gray bleakness of that Old Devil, television with a screen full of color and scenery.

And yet, still more:

John Michael Hayes wrote four screenplays in a row for Hitchcock -- "Rear Window," "To Catch a Thief," "The Trouble With Harry" "The Man Who Knew Too Much" -- and this one may just be the wittiest. Oh, "Rear Window" had its great lines,but "Rear Window" had a lot of gripping suspense and silent camerawork. "To Catch a Thief" is a comedy romance that rather DEPENDS on those great lines. Not just between Grant and Kelly, but between Jessie Royce Landis (as spoiled Grace's no-nonsense rich widow of a mother) and EVERYBODY.

I particularly like Grace's line to Cary when he says he's in the lumber business.

Grace: You don't look like an Oregon lumberman to me.
Cary: I must remember to shout 'timber!" more often.

Or when Grace tells Cary that she's reported to the police everything that happened between Cary and she the last night.

Cary: Everything? Oh, the boys down at the station must have enjoyed THAT.

There's also the dapper fun of John Williams (a Hitchcock character acting favorite, not the musical composer of "Jaws" and "Family Plot") as Grant's reluctant "partner in crime": an Insurance man who gives up the info on rich residents of Monaco so that Cary can find the copycat thief who is framing him for robberies. Grant and Williams trade some nice lines, too.

And how about this:

Early in the film, Cary dresses up in a nice tuxedo and goes into a Monaco casino to play Baccarat. You're waiting for him to say, "Bond, James Bond." But of course, the Bond movies were seven years away! Hey, wait a minute. Maybe they start RIGHT HERE. (With "North by Northwest" to provide further underpinnings for the Bond series: action, femme fatales, supervillains with mountain lairs, etc.)

Not to mention:

One of the sexiest yet funniest moments in movie history. On their first meeting, Cary escorts the luminously beautiful Grace -- heretofore nearly silent -- to her hotel room door. Grace lays a big sexy kiss on Cary -- we see only the back of his head, which is quite funny -- and closes the door. Cary turns in close-up with a "Cary Grant grin" and turns to walk down the hall with a languid yet jaunty Cary Grant walk...as Hitchcock's camera pulls back to play off the elegance of the joke.

There are other sexy-funny scenes in "To Catch A Thief" . The chicken picnic ("Breast...or thigh?" Grace asks.) The fireworks courtship in the darkened hotel room with Grace's breast's a heavin' in another gorgeous gown. "Look at them!" (The diamonds, she means.) "Have you ever had a better offer?" Cary's grumpy reply: "I've never had a crazier one."

There's also the saucy humor of Cary caught between two vixens -- Grace's society girl and Danielle Auber's barely-legal Frenchgirl stalker -- in the open water off Cannes. Cary's head bobs back and forth comically as the two women trade barbs en route to a waterbound catfight that doesn't quite happen.

Sexy. Funny. "To Catch a Thief."

But wait:

It IS a thriller. Maybe not as suspenseful as "Psycho." Maybe not as action packed "North by Northwest." But Cary's John Robie is a former jewel thief who also happens to be a mass murderer: to win his freedom from incarceration, Robie killed scores of Nazis in WWII, and his stout maid, Robie notes, "once strangled a German general with her bare hands...without a sound."

John Robie is, in short, a dangerous man -- certainly a more lethal professional than Roger Thornhill a few years later-- and he is also "the wrong man" in the classic Hitchcock tradition, hunted by the police for new robberies while being stalked by gangsters who want the heat off. There's a fair amount of suspense, danger, and potential death lurking beneath the glamour surface of "To Catch A Thief."

It all comes together at a masked ball in which the costumes pop our eyes out while Cary (a former acrobat in real life) does some daring jumping and hanging from rooftops.

Hitchcock perfected so many genres: the spy movie. the slasher movie. the child-kidnap movie. the bomber movie.

Here, Hitchcock perfects "the caper jewel heist movie." "The Pink Panther" was just one of the knock-offs from this film. And Robert Wagner had a 60's TV show called "It Takes a Thief" ("It Takes a thief...to catch a thief") that borrowed from this movie quite a bit.

All these years later, I think one has to sweep aside the thriller elements of "To Catch A Thief" to find its real value in the Hitchcock canon. Let there be no doubt: this was a big hit for Hitchocck, and a defining work in his canon. It stands as perhaps the most glamourous movie of the fifties, with the most perfectly paired stars. There can never be another movie like it. It's impossible.

But "To Catch A Thief" lived on beyond its making to add two grand Hitchcockian ironies that give it an even more special aura today:

1. Grace Kelly soon became the Princess of the small, rich nation in which this movie is set. Hitchcock, who wanted to work with Grace Kelly forever, is the man who brought her to the place that would cause her to give up movies.

2. The film's then-quite-exciting car chase sequence (process screens were fine back then) now carries a dark charge: Grace Kelly speeds around cliff-side corners in Monaco where she would die in a car crash in 1982.

Hitchcock, who died in 1980, would not have appreciated that Hitchcockian irony at all.