Break out the champagne (again), the '55 Hitchcock...

Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief screens today at the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival. In celebration of the third annual greatest-classic-film-festival-in-the-world, I’m posting this new and improved version of a piece on To Catch a Thief that first appeared here on New Year’s Day 2011.

Traditionally, champagne is the drink du jour (or nuit) at New Year’s, and so champagne it shall be now. A bottle of ‘96 Dom Pérignon Rosé would be fitting, but I’m in the mood for something really special…an old favorite… Hitchcock’s distinctive ’55 vintage from the Cote d'Azur. To Catch a Thief (1955), a delectable “Hitchcock champagne,” boasts a rare combination of elegance and flair. Light-bodied with a smooth finish that lingers, it remains unmatched, though it has been imitated far and wide for decades.

"the azure coast" of France

A jaunty score sets the tone as opening credits roll over a shot of an international travel service with a poster in the window, “If you like life, you’ll love France.” The tinkling keys of a grand piano hint at continental sophistication and adventure long before the first scream bemoaning stolen jewelry issues from a Riviera hotel balcony.

Quickly the action picks up speed with a colorful cruise through the Cote d'Azur as French police race to the village of Sainte-Jeannet and the hillside villa of retired jewel thief and prime suspect, John Robie (Cary Grant). From these early sequences and throughout the film, cinematographer Robert Burks displays VistaVision/Technicolor to full effect; it was Hitchcock's first use of the widescreen/color process that would become a signature of his color films for the rest of the 1950s.

Cinematographer Robert Burks

Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Burks had initially worked together five years earlier following the director’s return to the U.S. after making two films in England. Hitchcock was beginning production on Strangers on a Train for Warner Bros. and the studio cinematographer assigned to the project was 40-year-old Burks. It would be the beginning of a fabled partnership. Burks began his career at 19 in the Warner Bros. special effects lab when Hal Wallis, who favored shadows and high contrast on the screen, was in charge of production. Burks apprenticed under James Wong Howe, worked his way up to DP and, by 1948, had risen to cinematographer.

The early influence of German expressionism on Hitchcock corresponded nicely with the influences Burks absorbed at Warner Bros. and the two would collaborate on 12 films from 1951 – 1964, every picture Hitchcock made during that period except Psycho. Like Burks, Hitchcock had intimate knowledge of special effects and had an affinity for scenes of complex imagery. One of the most memorable in the Hitchcock/Burks canon came in Strangers on a Train with the scene in which Robert Walker’s murder of Laura Elliott is reflected in the lens of her fallen eyeglasses.

Hitchcock (top center) beside the VistaVision camera

Robert Burks was Oscar-nominated for Strangers and again for Rear Window. With To Catch a Thief, he finally won an Academy Award for cinematography. From 1955 – 1958, Burks shot five Hitchcock films in VistaVision/ Technicolor; four of the five were for Paramount Pictures. Paramount had been the only major film studio to balk at the widescreen CinemaScope system when it came on the scene in 1953. The studio set out to develop a process of its own and worked with Eastman Kodak to develop VistaVision, a method that delivered a higher resolution widescreen version of 35 mm. The VistaVision process printed down large format negatives to standard 35 mm, creating a finer-grained print and improved image. The use of Technicolor's dye transfer process was key to VistaVision color image quality. For his first foray into VistaVision/Technicolor, Hitchcock devised a stylish romantic thriller infused with dazzling starpower.

When he introduced a recent screening of To Catch a Thief, TCM’s Robert Osborne remarked that it had “the best asset any film could have...Cary Grant.” Good point. This was the third of Grant’s four Hitchcock pictures and it came nearly ten years after their last collaboration, Notorious (1946), one of the best films in either man’s illustrious filmography. In the interim, Hitchcock’s career had gone into and dramatically come out of a slump. During the same period, Grant had continued to make popular films, but had begun to move away from the kind of part he had trademarked – the dapper, self-effacing man of the world. Following Dream Wife (1953) Grant retired, dissatisfied with the parts and films he was being offered. But then he was approached by Alfred Hitchcock who had a project in mind with the requisite amount of elegance and humor to attract him. In To Catch a Thief Cary Grant returned to type; John Robie, “The Cat,” is a dashing charmer, “a man of obvious good taste” very few could or would want to resist. Grant seldom departed from type during the remaining years of his career.

To Catch a Thief was the third and final film Grace Kelly would make with Hitchcock, who would have worked with her for the rest of his career had she not left movies to become Princess of Monaco. Hitchcock’s breathtaking onscreen vision of Kelly brings to mind Josef von Sternberg’s ravishing cinematic glorification of Marlene Dietrich 20 years earlier. Kelly was a beautiful woman but among the handful of films she made, it was in her films for Hitchcock that her image as a screen goddess achieved perfection. In To Catch a Thief she plays a spoiled rich girl, the ultimate "snow covered volcano" and "Hitchcock blonde."

Grace Kelly and Cary Grant

Grant and Kelly are captivating together onscreen and both deliver iconic characterizations with ease - Grant as a debonair retired thief/innocent man, and she as a haughty/hot debutante. The pair literally generates fireworks.

Jessie Royce Landis

In her first Hitchcock outing, Jessie Royce Landis portrays Kelly’s insouciant and earthy, bourbon-sipping mother. Hitchcock liked to include colorful women as supporting characters in his films, ranging from the ridiculous (Florence Bates in Rebecca) and the oblivious (Patricia Collinge in Shadow of a Doubt), to the observant and wisecracking (Thelma Ritter in Rear Window, Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo). Royce Landis portrayed two of the most appealing of the latter type in this film and North by Northwest.

Actor John Williams made his third appearance in a Hitchcock film with To Catch a Thief, this time as an insurance agent helping Robie track down the real jewel thief. His H.H. Hughson is a fine foil for Grant’s Robie. Their early scenes provide Hitchcock the opportunity to have some fun with a favorite theme, the ambiguity of guilt and innocence. Robie tells Hughson flatly that though he “only stole from those who wouldn’t go hungry,” he “kept everything myself.” Chiding Hughson for stealing hotel sundries and cheating on his expense account, Robie comments, “I was an out and out thief…like you.” Robie emphasizes his point with the throwaway line, “I wish I’d known someone in the insurance racket when I went into the burglary business.” Hitchcock toys with subject again when Robie refers to the sensitive hands and delicate touch of his cook and housekeeper, Germaine, who bakes a quiche as "light as air" and who, during the war, “strangled a German general once…without a sound.” 

John Williams, Grace Kelly, Rene Blancard...costumes by Edith Head

While some dismiss To Catch a Thief for lack of substance, there's no question that it is a solid film of its genre. With meticulous craftsmanship and tremendous style, Hitchcock delivered exactly what he intended - a voluptuous romantic thriller. All elements blend in harmony, from the John Michael Hayes screenplay to Robert Burks' VistaVision/ Technicolor photography, Lyn Murray’s score, Edith Head’s eyeball-popping costumes, two scintillating stars and the Cote d’Azur setting. 

To Catch a Thief was successful and influential, and many later films bear its earmarks...most prominently Stanley Donen’s Charade, as well as his Arabesque, William Wyler's How to Steal a Million, Blake Edwards' The Pink Panther and countless romance/thriller romps ever since.

~

One of the principal  themes of this year's 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival is Style in the Movies. Kimberly Truhler of GlamAmor.com, who is attending and blogging on the festival, produced and hosts the following video, Cinema Style File - Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief: 

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Sunday, April 15, 2012