Hit Me With Your Best Shot - To Catch a Thief

To Catch a Thief is one of my favorite Hitchcock films. If I'm being honest with myself, it's not one of his best, but it is oh so very good at being what it is - an entertaining, luxe, escapist thriller - that it is always in my Top Ten Favorite Hitchcocks. Few of the Master of Suspense's Hollywood films are so purely entertaining, and none have as much glamour.

I love many things about To Catch a Thief, but we are here to discuss cinematography. And there are three things I really love about the cinematography of To Catch a Thief.

1. The location photography, including best rear-projection driving scenes in Old Hollywood.

2. The visual wit. This is one of Hitchcock's wittiest films visually.

"Un poulet!"

3. The green-ish nighttime hues.

 

 

"Mother, the book you're reading is upside down!"

That last one is my favorite moment in the film, a perfect example of the film's wit. But I felt weird picking it for the Best Shot, since what makes me laugh is the placement of that line of dialogue. My Best Shot comes near the end of the film, as Cary Grant's retired cat burglar John Robie hides out on the roof waiting to catch his copy cat. We've only just found out that the costumed gentleman dancing with Grace Kelly's danger whore Francie all night was not John but rather the insurance adjuster working with him to protect the jewels he has insured, and Hitch cuts right to John on the roof and does the magnificent pull-out (which I wasn't able to gif):

It's so stunningly lit, and the camera moves so perfectly, and it puts you right into John's slightly vertiginous head space - he knows what he's doing, he's in his element, but he's nervous. If he doesn't catch this guy, he's going to jail for something he didn't do. And might also lose a beautiful woman in the process. It's an effortless shot, just like the whole film.

Thursday Movie Picks - Alfred Hitchcock Movies

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Come and join us - all you have to do is pick three films that fit the week's theme and tell us about them!

Welcome to October! That means it's Halloween month, and Thursday Movie Picks is celebrating with different scary-movie-themed picks every week. For this week, we turn to the "Master of Suspense", Alfred Hitchcock himself. The man has directed so damn many great films that it's practically obscene. I haven't seen all of them, but I have seen many of them (I had four full VHS tapes of them recorded from a TCM marathon when I was younger), and plenty of episodes of his great TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, too. Yeah, I guess you could say I'm a fan.

But... to pick just three? JUST. THREE?!?!?! Okay, fine. These are not my three favorites. Nor are they what I consider to be his three best (and yes, those are two very different things). They aren't even the three that I would tell people to start with if they had never seen even a single Hitchcock film before. These three are the ones that I think are his most underrated.

Sabotage (1936) - The most famous description of Hitchcock's style was given by the man himself, in his long-ranging interview with Francois Truffaut. It's the famous discourse on the difference between surprise and suspense - if you show a conversation between two people at a dinner table, and after a while a bomb explodes, that's surprise. However, if you show the audience the bomb under the table first, and then play the exact same scene, that's suspense. Sabotage, one of the last films he made in England before going to Hollywood, contains perhaps the most obvious - and cruelest - demonstration of that. It's only a five or six-minute sequence, but it feels twice that long for all the stress the film puts you through. Sylvia Sidney plays a woman whose husband owns a cinema. He's always been nice to her and her (much younger) brother Stevie, but she gradually begins to suspect that he's part of a terrorist gang planning a series of attacks in London. And then one afternoon, Stevie has to deliver a film canister to Piccadilly Circus...

Stage Fright (1950) - You know how everyone talks about Psycho and how shocking it was when Hitchcock killed off the film's biggest star by the halfway point? Well, he had been toying with audience's expectations and cinematic narrative conventions for years before that. Stage Fright is a bit of a lark, a trifle in a filmography as great of Hitch's, but its big twist is one of the greatest cinematic acts of pulling the rug right out from under the audience. Jane Wyman is Eve Gill, a young acting student who hides her crush, acting fellow student, from the cops, who suspect him of murdering his lover's husband. In order to prove his innocence, she becomes the temporary maid to his lover: the great actress Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich).

To Catch a Thief (1955) - I keep seeing people refer to this one as "lesser" or "minor" Hitchcock, and I just don't get it. No, it's not Vertigo or Psycho or Rear Window or even North By Northwest, but it's possibly the most purely entertaining film he ever directed, with one great scene after another. It's also boosted immeasurably by its stars, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, neither of whom were ever more alluring than they are here. Retired jewel thief John "The Cat" Robie is forced out of retirement when a copycat criminal leads the police to interrupt his quiet, comfortable life on the French Riviera. He manages to convince an insurance agent to let him keep an eye on their wealthiest clients and their jewels in the hopes of catching the impostor in the act. Only it seems one of them, Frances Stevens, knows exactly who he is... and also has a bit of a taste for danger. This is apparently legendary costume designer Edith Head's favorite film she ever worked on.

BONUS: The Ten Best Hitchcock Films (according to me... my favorites will get their own post)
1. Vertigo
2. Psycho
3. Notorious
4. Rear Window
5. Shadow of a Doubt
6. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
7. The 39 Steps
8. I Confess
9. Strangers on a Train
10. Rebecca