BEFORE: Grace Kelly carries over again, completing a hat trick. I think this means that in the last three days I've seen more Grace Kelly movies than I have in the previous 45 years. Which seems a little odd, but then I don't think she made too many movies before becoming a princess, and then after that she didn't really need to, did she?
THE PLOT: When a reformed jewel thief is suspected of returning to his former occupation, he must ferret out the real thief in order to prove his innocence.
AFTER: At first this film seems like a real change of pace for Hitchcock, being set in the world of high society and concentrating on a jewel thief, instead of a murdering murderer planning a murder. But then the plot kicks in and (say it along with me now...) a man is falsely accused of a crime and must outrun the cops while finding the real criminal, and falling in love with a beautiful girl along the way. Seriously, that simple plot outline describes at least half of Hitch's films, I've learned.
I'm guessing that the term "cat burglar" was relatively new to the language in 1955, because Hitchcock opened the film with a montage of robberies, and each time showed a black cat walking across a rooftop, so that the audience would "get it". Thanks, Alfie, but we're not idiots. I understand why you couldn't show the actual robber, but you dumbed it down too much.
John Robie is a retired cat burglar who is suspected of pulling off the new robberies - he also owns a black cat, but it's not the same black cat we saw walking across the rooftops, because he says she never leaves the villa. So why have two black cats in the same film, isn't this just a bit confusing? And if the new cat burglar is a copycat, does that make him a copycat burglar?
You would think that it would be easy for Robie to prove to the police that he didn't pull the new robberies. All he'd have to do would be to prove his whereabouts for the nights in question, and let them search his villa, at which point they would find no jewels or other evidence to connect him to the crimes. No, instead he runs from the cops, which makes him look guilty, and then he tries to find the new cat burglar on his own. To do this he contacts an insurance agent to find out who owns the best jewels in the area, and is therefore a target for future robberies.
The problem is, this is exactly the sort of information he'd need if he were planning to do future heists himself. So, to prove his innocence, he has to think like a burglar and act like a burglar, which only serves to make him look much more guilty. Wouldn't working WITH the police to prove his innocence be that much more effective? He'd just have to be within sight of a police officer ONE TIME during a heist to lend credence to the copycat theory. Instead he seems to take the long way around.
There's some convoluted justification for his former lifestyle - Robie claims that everyone is a thief, it's just a matter of degrees. Some people cheat on their taxes, or their expense reports, so really, how different is that from being a jewel thief? I'm not sure I can follow this line of reasoning - when you dress all in black and a hood and climb into windows at night, come on, you know you're doing something wrong.
As for the romance between Robie and Frances Stevens, she manages to see past his alias and figure out who he really is - at first she's excited by who he is, then upset when the robberies continue, and they have this back-and-forth that seems to hinge on "is he innocent or guilty", but it's tough to say which outcome she's rooting for at times.
I got a creepy sort of feeling watching Grace Kelly riding in a speeding car along the twisty roads of Monaco, and yep, she died in a car accident in 1982 not far from where this film's picnic scenes were shot. I think she had a stroke while driving, but the scenes still carry a weird sense of foreboding.
Also starring Cary Grant (last seen in "Notorious"), John Williams (last seen in "Dial M For Murder"), Jessie Royce Landis, Brigitte Auber.
RATING: 6 out of 10 fireworks
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