To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief is generally classified, not too inappropriately, as a relatively light-hearted diversion between weightier efforts: although the plot is organized around the mystery of the identity of the thief to be caught, any suspense is entirely notional. The film is heavy with established signifiers of “sophistication” – gorgeous French Riviera settings (it duly won an Oscar for its cinematography, although of all Hitchcock’s films, it often comes closest simply to assembling pretty pictures) with costumes and jewelry to match; it has Cary Grant and Grace Kelly (of whom, likewise, little more is asked than to stand in the foreground of those pretty pictures – the film in no way engages with Grant’s presence in the way of the later North by Northwest). Certainly it has its recognizably “Hitchcockian” elements, but those elements seem generally disembodied, almost abstract, as such signalling a tendency which would become increasingly prominent in the director’s later work: consider for instance the placement and effect of such devices as the opening close-ups of screaming victims intercut with black cats on the roof; the cutting from a seduction scene to an explosion of fireworks (so overemphatic it almost transcends the cliché) and the almost equally overwhelming explosion of flowers during a chase scene; the use of back projection at various points; the costume party finale, with Grant (or is it?) clad in a bizarre black-masked get-up. The movie hints at psychosexual undercurrents of the kind that would be more fully developed in Marnie – Kelly’s Frances Stevens is a sexual aggressor with a somewhat sordidly facilitating mother, clearly drawn to Grant’s John Robie for his deviant past (and she’s not even the only age-inappropriate woman trying to throw herself at him) – but these remain defiantly underexplored, no less so than the weightless evocation of lingering allegiances and resentments dating back to the French resistance.