★★
….to catch a thief. That’s pretty much the story of this movie, which has gorgeous settings, nice cinematography, and a high-caliber cast. Beyond that, there’s not a lot here to recommend this film, and it proves that you need more than quality ingredients to make a good dish. The story here is flimsy, the characters shallow, the acting surprisingly uninspired and the humor flat.
I did enjoy the way the aerial landscapes stretch across my screen as the helicopter-mounted camera follow cars in chases, and scenes like the extravagant costume party vibrate with color. Cinematographer Robert Burks does little in the way of low-angle shots and menacing shadows, moving the look of Hitchcock’s film away from George Barnes’ noir look to a broader, color-oriented style. But Burks’ approach has some fine moments, and It Takes a Thief showcases several: the lighting that obscures Grace Kelly’s face and illuminates her necklace instead, the diptych of windows with fireworks going on outside, the striking silhouette of Grant backlit by a spotlight in front of him.
But as in many of the other Hitchcock films I’ve watched, the humor here has a vaguely schoolboy-ish quality to it. Brigitte Auber’s flirting is sometimes painful—“it's a virgin country”--, and only Grace Kelly can get away with asking Cary Grant if he wants breast or leg (of chicken) and not have the line fall flat. But this dialog doesn’t have the snappy repartee of that in screwball comedies. It’s dull and dated.
To Catch a Thief is supposed to be a romantic thriller, but it’s neither to me. The cinematography redeems the film enough to make watching it pleasant, but it’s not much more than a series of nice images strung together with a story that might pique some curiosity in some viewers.
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