REVIEW: ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S 'TO CATCH A THIEF'

Opening with a shot of a travel agents window advertising France as a tourist destination, Hitchcock's 1955 'To Catch a Thief' could very well be mistaken for a advertisement funded by the French tourist board. That is, however, until a sudden cut to a panic-stricken woman screaming takes over the screen and we are violently thrust back into the world of Alfred Hitchcock, where the pleasant parts of life are overlooked in favour of the sinister.

We see the character of John Robie, played brilliantly by Cary Grant, living a reformed life of peace in the south of France after living the life of a well-known jewel thief, however in the typical Hitchcock trope of 'the wrong man', he is accused of being responsible for a new set of jewel robberies in France and is pursued by the police. The film follows Robie's attempts to catch the real jewel thief and clear his name of the crimes he has not permitted.

The first thing to comment on about this film is the absolutely stunning cinematography  The
picturesque backdrop of the south of France combined with the beautiful camerawork makes for one of Hitchcock's most aesthetically pleasing films. Robert Burks, the cinematographer for this feature, worked on many other Hitchcock films such as North by Northwest and Vertigo, however he seemed to have peaked before either of these two films with the beautiful camerawork featured in To Catch a Thief.

The plot is good, not the best of Hitchcock's, but the performances from Grace Kelly and Cary Grant are as brilliant as ever. The suspense and intrigue caused from the two actors is really quite something, with Kelly looking fantastic and desirable as the infamous 'Hitchcock Blonde' and Grant playing the role of a man wrongly convicted nicely. It seems that Grant's performance in this film was perhaps his warm-up role to the peak-performance of his career, North by Northwest which was produced four years later.

The directing is as good as any other Hitchcock film, with the film being released in the '50s, it is clear that Alfred Hitchcock was in the prime of his career, becoming an auteur and finding both his strengths and weaknesses as a director. The film is definitely worth watching, if it's just for the cinematography itself, however, like all Hitchcock films, the audience is taken on a journey of suspense, with pauses for comedy and a subplot of a love interest with complications, the film boasts perhaps one of Hitchcock's most well-rounded features.