To Catch A Thief

Typical of the fol-de-rol that passed out of Hollywood studios (in this case, Paramount) in the 1950s, Hitchcock's characteristically tongue-in-cheek, double-entendre-laden romance-comedy-mystery written by John Michael Hayes, who had written Rear Window (1954), is light less than in the as-a-feather sense than in being full of air.

Cary Grant, tanned to a few-shades short of blackface and the alabaster white Grace Kelly play an indefatigably elegant cat-and-mouse game of courtship amongst the expensive watering holes of the French Riveria, a popular location of the period, whilst Grant, a reformed cat burglar, in his free time sets about catching a thief who is emulating his crimes of yesteryear.

Shot in Vistavision, Paramount's answer to Cinemascope, and shifting between travelogue-like exterior photography and back-projected studio sets, a large part of the film (for which Hitch's regular cinematographer Robert Burks won an Oscar) is padding between the moments that count, although Kelly, in her third film for Hitch after Dial M For Murder and Rear Window, both released the previous year, gives probably the most alluring performance of her career (she met future husband, Prince Rainier of Monaco, whilst making this which as a result becme her last film).

 

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