Film Nitrate

By 1954 Alfred Hitchcock's reputation was still growing. He was accustomed to receiving generally positive reviews and was one of the most successful directors working in Hollywood at the time. However his next film, Dial M for Murder , would ignite what was to be the golden age of the veteran filmmaker's career, and over the next decade he would create films like Vertigo , North by Northwest and Psycho and influence cinema like no other director before or since. But in 1954 Hitchcock was short on ideas. He'd intended for his follow-up to the previous year's I Confess to be based on a 1948  novel, The Bramble Bush , by David Duncan. The story, which Hitchcock had been working on adapting since before starting production on I Confess , was the same basic thread he'd used before, a 'wrong-man' tale in which a fugitive is forced to assume the identity of a murder suspect. After Warner Bros. had taken exception to the left-wing politics of the story and...

Frances: "I'm in love with you." John Robie: "Now that's a ridiculous thing to say." Though To Catch a Thief is notable in that it is as Hitchcock film with little of his trademark suspense, it is nevertheless unmistakably a Hitchcock film. Indeed, much of it seems like a blueprint for 1959's masterpiece North by Northwest . Cary Grant plays John Robie, an ex-cat burglar, retired to the French Riviera. A number of recent robberies that mirror his style leads the police to his home where they attempt to arrest him, however he escapes from them and decides that the best way to prove his innocence is to try and catch the copycat burglar in the act. Through his old contacts, Robie finds out where all of the most valuable privately-owned jewels in the Riviera are currently located. Then then leads him to make acquaintance with the owners of the most expensive jewels - Jessie Stevens (played by Jessie Royce Landis), and her beautiful daughter Frances (...