Unwittingly, I made my Fourth of July an Alfred Hitchcock double feature.  I say unwittingly because I did not know either choice was made by arguably the most famous director of all time.  My only guiding principles in watching Rope (1948) were that it was old and short.  The fact that Hitchcock was behind the camera was an added bonus.  On Amazon Prime, it gives you a list of suggestions that its algorithm feels are related to a title.  With Rope, it gave me To Catch a Thief (1955).  Somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory I probably had stored a connection between it and Hitchcock, but had forgotten.  What I did notice is that it starred Cary Grant.  That was enough for me, and its runtime helped.  Again, as could be said about almost anything for which he was responsible, Hitchcock was a further pleasant surprise.

The police in French Riviera make it their mission To Catch a Thief.  There have been a series of “cat burglaries,” or thefts done at night with the perpetrator sneaking into the rooms of the wealthy and stealing their valuables.  The authorities first suspect is John Robie (Cary Grant), a famous American cat burglar who helped the French Resistance during World War II.  After the conflict, he stayed but gave up his thieving ways, trading in his illicit gains for a gorgeous villa overlooking the Mediterranean.  When they come to make the arrest, he creates a distraction, sending them chasing his maid Germaine (Georgette Anys) while he hides at home.  Seeking answers, he turns to an old comrade from the war, Monsieur Bertani (Charles Vanel).  Monsieur Bertani runs a restaurant, and most of his fellow resistance fighters are in his employ.  They are not pleased when John shows up looking for help, feeling that he is the one behind the crimes, which also brings suspicion to them.  Monsieur Bertani agrees to assist John, enlisting Danielle Foussard (Brigette Auber) to smuggle him out of the city.  John is also given the name of an insurance agent, H. H. Hughson (John Williams), who agrees to give John a list of all the people in the area with significant hoards of jewels.  John’s thinking is that he can keep tabs on this group of people, hopefully doing what the title suggests, and clearing his name.  Unfortunately, the police get to this meeting not long thereafter and take John into custody.  They let him go, however, when he promises to clear his name.  On the list given him by Hughson, the name at the top is the Stevens family, a mother and daughter pair of oil heiresses from the United States.  Hughson has a meeting with them and through it, John (going by the alias of a lumber baron named Conrad Burns) ingratiates himself with them.  Though she plays aloof at first, it is Frances “Francie” Stevens (Grace Kelly), the daughter, who develops the most interest in John.  During the course of them spending the day together on the pretext of looking at villas to rent, Francie lets John know that she is aware of his real identity.  She finds him to be charming all the same, and even talks of wanting to know all about what it is like to be in his profession.  He continues to deny any connection to a life of crime until the new cat burglar strikes, taking Jessie Stevens’ (Jessie Royce Landis) jewels.  Francie is not happy that her mother’s valuables are gone and immediately demands that John return them.  He protests his innocence, though finally confessing that he is John Robie, but manages to escape before the gendarme arrive.  After a few days, he comes out of hiding and contacts Hughson.  John plans a trap for the real thief, and gets Hughson to tip off the police that he is going to be at his next target, which happens to be the villa he cased with Francie.  That night, John is attacked by Foussard (Jean Martinelli), Danielle’s father and one of Monsieur Bertani’s men.  In the resulting scuffle, with the police on hand, Foussard plummets to his death.  For them, and the rest of the press in the French Riviera, Foussard is pronounced to be the cat burglar.  John knows this cannot be true because Foussard has a wooden leg, the result of having lost one while a part of the French Resistance.  Therefore, he lacks the agility to carry out these crimes.  In either case, they are satisfied.  John is not, though the apology and the admission of love on Francie’s part does do him good.  It also leads to the Stevens, along with Hughson, assisting John in coming up with a new plan to again do what the title says.  It takes place at the same villa, this time during a party in the style of the eighteenth-century courts of France.  Playing a hunch that the true criminal would be among those helping at the soiree, John uses Hughson to stand in his place at the party while he goes on the roof to wait.  As he expects, the real cat burglar shows himself, or I should say herself.  This is because it turns out to be Danielle.  She had been enamored of John, and apparently jealous when he did not return her affections.  John catches her before she can fall from the roof, and with her dangling from her arm, admits to the disguised policemen on the ground below that it had been her the entire time.  She also lets on that Monsieur Bertani had been an accomplice.  With everything tied up, John returns to his own home.  Francie is not far behind, and the last shot has her telling him how much her mother will love it here with a bell ringing in the background.

I think you can get what is being implied with this last scene in To Catch a Thief.  Hitchcock was a master of such things.  Still, as I said in the introduction, I did not watch it for him, mostly because I had forgotten that he had directed it.  It was Cary Grant that drew me to this movie, and now I would like to focus my Catholic energies on his character.  He is somebody with a past.  Such lines are cliché because everyone literally has a set of experiences that make us who we are that we euphemistically refer to as a “past.”  For John, it is one that he cannot seem to escape.  When people in this part of France hear the name John Robie, it brings with it a set of assumptions.  Francie teases John about it, but it initially guides how she treats him.  The thing about God, and this is a core belief of Catholicism, is that He can wipe that so-called “past” away.  It is said as much in the Bible, though we have a tangible way of experiencing this every time we go to Confession.  One of the last things the priest says to you before you leave the Confessional is to go forth, your sins are forgiven.  At no point does anyone say this to John.  It makes a difference in peoples’ lives to know they are pardoned, and perhaps it could have made a difference in John’s life.

I have probably said this before, but To Catch a Thief confirms my belief that old Hitchcock is best Hitchcock.  As he got older, he seemed to get lazier about how he constructed his films.  With this one, he had the picturesque backdrop of the French Riviera to do most of the work for him.  The plot is a solid one, too.  This one gets my recommendation.