In this case, though, we are watching Cary Grant and Grace Kelly meet. No, “To Catch a Thief” might be as close as Hitchcock ever got to the greatest of all cinematic escapist fantasies, “To Have and Have Not”, which had no other point than watching Bogey and Bacall watch each other. Then again, everything in a Hitchcock joint is deliberate and the obviousness of the double only underlines how it’s not really the point in the first place.
She is such an obvious double, in fact, that it essentially gives away the game. Tasked with ferrying Robie to Cannes by speedboat to evade police, she is costumed like a mirror of Robie with a scarf and a similar striped shirt. The latter emerges in the form of Danielle Foussard (Brigitte Auber), daughter of the wine steward at the restaurant where all of Robie’s ex-cohorts work. This allows Hitchcock to intertwine a couple of his favorite themes, The Innocent Man and The Double. Indeed, just as Grant took on the project so does Robie re-enter the game, in a manner of speaking, protesting his innocence and setting out to prove it by catching the current cat burglar in the act. The character’s seclusion rhymes with the real-life Grant, who had retired, ostensibly, but was convinced to take on the project anyway by Hitchcock, promising the scenic filming locations and work with a co-star as smashing as Grace Kelly as their own reward. The French authorities immediately suspect John Robie (Cary Grant), a long retired but still notorious thief whose work in the French Resistance has apparently not cleansed all his sins. Sometimes the camera loses sight of the car altogether! Who cares?! Look at the pristine blue sea! The crime and the cat burglar, in other words, are themselves the MacGuffin as much as anything else, and that travel agency window is as evocative of what’s to come as the window in Jeff Jeffries’s Chelsea apartment, in tune to the nature of cinema’s voyeurism, though in a less suspenseful way than insouciant. But not long after, when the suspected cat burglar flees police, or seems to, Hitch films the chase from an aerial shot more invested, frankly, in the surrounding scenery more than the chase itself. Granted, Hitch then cuts to a close-up of a woman screaming, victimized by a jewel thief, and a brief montage of other victims and scrambling police. When the credits finish, the camera presses in on one of the posters, as if we, the audience, are in need of a vacation. The backdrop for the opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” is a travel agency, with vintage posters advertising scenic getaways and a miniature Eiffel Tower on display in the window.
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