The Cat Comes Out of Retirement: Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief

John Robie is a jewel thief called the Cat. Or at least he used to be, back in the heyday of his criminal career. He went clean years ago and has been living a quiet, reclusive life in a French chalet, where his main companions are his actual cat and his loyal housekeeper.

But one day this quiet life is shattered when the police come to call. He's been expecting them: a series of successful jewel robberies along the Riviera point right to him, since the method of the burglar is precisely his own. Robie knows he is innocent, and proclaims it repeatedly to anyone who will listen, but he also knows that he can never again rest with this Copy Cat on the loose. The police are convinced Robie has come out of retirement and is up to his old tricks. Robie is convinced he is the only one who can catch the current thief, both because he knows the police won't bother (since they think he's doing it) and because he figures he'll be able to anticipate the new Cat's next moves, given his own past experience.

So Robie (played by the always suave and sophisticated Cary Grant) comes out of retirement after all, not to return to his life of crime, but to go on the prowl in an attempt to catch the current thief red-handed. He tries to enlist the help of some other former thieves whom he knew in the French Resistance. They've all gone clean and been pardoned, and they're now running a restaurant together. They're none too happy to see Robie (one even throws an egg at him!) because they're convinced he's fallen off the wagon and is back to his bad thieving habits. But the owner of the restaurant, his old friend Bertani, decides to help him anyway,

That's the premise of the romantic and somewhat suspenseful movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1955. The suspense comes in the dilemma just described: will Robie catch the Cat before the police catch Robie and he lands in jail wrongfully accused? The romance comes in when Robie goes undercover at a swank resort on the Riviera, trying to guess whom the Copy Cat will target as the next easy mark for a jewel robbery. One possible target is Jessie Stevens (the very funny Jessie Royce Landis) a wealthy widow with a grown daughter. The daughter, Frances (Grace Kelly) is ravishingly beautiful...and highly suspicious of Robie's motives in befriending her mother and herself.

"For what it's worth, I never stole from anybody who would go hungry."

Robie's introduction to these wealthy potential targets comes through their insurance agent, H.H. Hughson (John Williams) one of my favorite characters in the movie. Hughson knows Robie's true identity but has been reluctantly persuaded (well, mostly persuaded) of Robie's innocence in the current crime wave. Williams gives a marvelous performance as the highly nervous and normally very conservative insurance agent taking the biggest risk of his career by trusting a former criminal with a list of some of his wealthiest clients. He plays the role with a kind of understated humor that permeates the whole film.

In fact it's the humor and the romance that make this film memorable. I've watched it numerous times, but as I re-watched it recently (for the first time in several years) I realized that the suspense factor never went as high as I recalled or as it did in many other Hitchcock films. My favorite Hitchcock/Grant vehicle is still, without a doubt, North by Northwest, whose climactic chase scene still has the ability to keep me chewing my nails until it's over. That suspenseful element is hardly here, perhaps because the audience never seriously doubts Robie's innocence (I don't think we're supposed to) so it's more a race with time than anything else.

But other people -- most especially Francie Stevens -- do doubt Robie's innocence, which is half the fun. You can't blame her for questioning his lackadaisical pose as an rich lumberman from Oregon. Grant is a terrific actor; it takes a good actor to play a character who essentially can't act at all. When Francie does some digging and finally confronts him with what she thinks she's learned about his identity, his denials (mostly grounded in silence or witty, cryptic remarks) aren't very convincing. But then you get the feeling that Robie is so weary of his past, he's too tired to get worked up about defending himself, especially to a gorgeous femme fatale who seems...well...rather stimulated (as she herself puts it) by his bad boy past.

The witty, romantic banter is a credit to screenwriter John Michael Hayes (who also penned the screenplay to 1954's Rear Window) and keeps the film moving about as fast as Francie drives on the winding, cliff-side roads. Landis, Francie's blunt-talking mother, has some of the funniest lines ("I'm sorry I ever sent her to finishing school...they finished her there..."), but it's the quick back and forth between Grant and Kelly that I enjoy the most. I called the police from your room and told them who you are and everything you've been doing tonight....Everything? The boys must have really enjoyed that at headquarters!

The dialogue, the scenes of the rolling landscapes and seascapes of the Riviera, and the glamorous costumes by Hollywood's legendary Edith Head lend this film a marvelous style that makes it easy to watch over and over. Granted, Head could have dressed Grace Kelly in paper bags and rags and she still would have been drop-dead gorgeous, but it's still lovely to see the svelte, elegant, cool-as-an-icicle Kelly glide around in dresses that seem expressly made for her royal kind of beauty. What impresses me most about Kelly though is the fact that she can hold her own dramatically and comedically in her scenes with Grant. You expect her to be able to do alluring and seductive, which she does, but the surprising wickedly mischievous streak and the tremulous and somewhat petulant vulnerability that come later are just as impressive. She and Grant make a gorgeous couple to look at, but it's the way they talk to each other, as well as look at each other, that makes their scenes sizzle and pop like the fireworks that light up their most famous love scene.

The ending fizzles a bit (especially if you've seen it before, which deflates even the modest amount of mystery and suspense Hitchcock injected into the story) but it's such a swank and delectable ride getting there that I can't mind much. People just don't make movies like this anymore, or seem to know how: films that feel glamorous and intelligent and also outright funny. I hope nobody ever tries to remake it, because no one could ever out-"Grace" Kelly or "Cary" a scene like Grant. Sorry...couldn't resist!

~befus, 2008

This film also holds a bittersweet place in my personal movie history. I grew up in a family that loved both Hitchcock and Cary Grant films, and we watched them often. We happened to be watching this movie on video one evening in the fall of 1986 when my father came into the room and announced (much to my mom's and my great sadness) that Cary Grant had just died.