To Catch a Thief (Special Collector's Edition)

Buy This Item To Catch a Thief (Special Collector's Edition) by Paramount  Available from Amazon  $13.99  on 11-14-2008     One of the creamiest of all of Alfred Hitchcock's films, <I>To Catch a Thief</I> is something like pure pleasure. Begin ticking off the ingredients of this 1955 movie and you'll get the picture: Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, the French Riviera, champagne, fireworks, cat burglary. Mmm, it already feels good. Grant plays a retired thief who becomes a suspect when valuable things begin disappearing along the Cote d'Azur. The diamonds hanging from the well-sculpted neck of Grace Kelly would appear to be the newest target, but it's just possible that actual romance might also be wafting through the Mediterranean air. The lightness of the story keeps <I>To Catch a Thief</I> from being one of the masterpieces of Hitchcock's great run in the 1950s, but it is very difficult to cavil about the sunny locations, Grant's elegant aplomb, and Kelly's shrewd withholding of her sexual interest beneath the ice-queen exterior. John Michael Hayes provided the amusing script (which stretches double entendres to their limit, especially in a romantic discussion of fried chicken), Edith Head the splendid costumes. If the movie has any weight at all, it's in proving that at this point in his career Hitchcock was consumed with charting the tricky terrain of male-female courtship; if issues of trust are treated here with a light touch, they nevertheless matter as much as the mechanical working-out of Mr. H's suspense stories. <I>--Robert Horton</I> Reader Reviews One of Hitchcock's finest. Far better than soggy stuff like Vertigo, or twittering drivel like The Birds. Irreplaceable Grace Grant and Cary Kelly, saturated with ineffable style and charisma. Beautiful, poised, elegant, brittle, delectable beyond compare, with a sly, sparkling, witty script, concealing an intriguing sub-text. Exclusively for sophisticates, of course. The plot, as usual with Hitch, whose plots are never plausible, is only a veneer, coating deeper, subterranean meanings. Set a thief to catch a thief: but who is catching who, here? Catch as catch can.

To Catch a Thief (Special Collector's Edition) Available from Amazon Price: $13.99 Updated on 11-14-2008.

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