Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Catching Cary Grant for
To Catch a Thief took
three years of patience and diplomacy.
Grant hadn’t appeared on-screen since starring with Deborah Kerr in
Dream Wife
in 1952. After that production, the mercurial star had announced his retirement. “It was the period of the blue jeans, the dope addicts, the Method, and nobody cared about elegance or comedy at all,” he explained later. After a world cruise Grant returned to Hollywood, but rejected script after script. Hitchcock had kept him apprised of
To Catch a Thief
from the moment the book was published, luring him along with tales of the sophisticated comedy he was planning, finally adding Grace Kelly—the epitome of elegance—as the coup de grace of his sales pitch.
As often happened, Hitchcock was willing to make personal sacrifices to realize his vision of
To Catch a Thief.
He even took a cut in salary to
accommodate the leading man he preferred above all others: under the agreement that transferred rights to the film to Paramount, Hitchcock agreed to take his 10 percent of profits on this film only
after
the studio had subtracted Grant’s 10 percent from the gross.
Grace Kelly’s star had continued to rise, thanks to the popularity of
Rear Window.
Only five Hitchcock films were listed among the top ten in the year of their release.
*
The first two were
Rebecca
and
Spellbound
, but
Rear Window
ranked behind only
White Christmas
and 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea
among the top films of 1954. (
North by Northwest
also hit the top ten, and
Psycho
soared the highest, becoming the number two film of 1960.)
Elia Kazan had offered Kelly the lead opposite Marlon Brando in
On the Waterfront
, but she preferred to travel to the south of France to reunite with the director she trusted from
Dial M for Murder
and
Rear Window.
The actress didn’t have that far to go to match Francie’s description in the book (“she had a good figure and the kind of Irish attractiveness that goes with blue eyes,” David Dodge wrote, with “a fair skin” and—the only difference—“dark hair”). Knowing his star, though, Hitchcock had enhanced her character’s scenes with mischief and naughtiness.
The European locale gave Hitchcock a chance to draw on a varied talent pool for his supporting cast, another bouillabaisse from a recipe only he could have devised. Charles Vanel was a magnetic Frenchman who had started his career in the silent era and made noteworthy appearances in Jacques Feyder, René Clair, and Marcel Carne films—most recently starring in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s
Wages of Fear
and
Diabolique
, watched repeatedly (and admired) by Hitchcock. Although Paramount was dubious, the director was determined to cast Vanel as Bertani, leader of the gang of former thieves who now run a catering cabal. (Bertani’s occupation was a Hitchcock touch; in the book his character is a black market wheeler-dealer trading in real estate, insurance, imports and exports—everything except food.)
Jessie Royce Landis had been on Broadway since 1926, acting in everything from Kaufman-and-Hart to Shakespeare to Jo in
Little Women
, and occasionally directing plays, as well as appearing in occasional films. She would portray Francie’s dyspeptic mother. The nimble John Williams, from
The Paradine Case
(where he can be glimpsed on the prosecution team) and
Dial M for Murder
, would play the insurance agent from Lloyds of London—“a thin, elderly man with white hair and a fierce white guardsman’s mustache,” according to the novel. Hitchcock
expanded the role to exploit Williams’s twinkling English-gentleman charm.
The director had seen tomboyish Brigitte Auber in Julien Duvivier’s
Sous les Ciels de Paris
and marked her down for Danielle, a sturdy French girl capable of climbing all over villa roofs (“nineteen or twenty, as pretty as a flower,” according to the book, “slim and small-breasted”). The fact that Auber had real circus training was a happy accident.
The Paramount team of Robert Burks (cameraman), Joseph MacMillan Johnson and John P. Fulton (special effects), George Tomasini (editor), Edith Head (costume design), and Herbert Coleman (assistant director) was carried over intact from
Rear Window
to
To Catch a Thief.
Reaching for another antidote to television, Paramount imposed a wide-screen process on Hitchcock for the first time. Although VistaVision was a viable alternative to CinemaScope, producing a sharp, wide, horizontal image with excellent depth of field, it never gained much popularity outside of Paramount. Hitchcock said later that he wasn’t enamored of what he called “oversized screens”—the format replicated as letterbox nowadays—but at the time such formats were sweeping the industry. “It leaves you with a good deal of empty space that causes the audience to wonder what it’s there for,” he once explained. “I happen to own a Dufy that was painted on a long, narrow canvas; but the subject is a harbor and therefore suitable. Filmmakers, on the other hand, are bound by the screens available throughout the world. You can’t compose for a New York screen only; you’ve got to think, say, of the screen in Thailand.” As with 3-D, though, Hitchcock went along with the trend, accepting Vista-Vision for
To Catch a Thief
and all his future Paramount films—even borrowing it for
North by Northwest.
The real trouble with VistaVision was in the close-ups. When Vista-Vision lenses focused on near images, the backgrounds—all that gorgeous scenery for which they were traveling to France—were blurred. Indeed, after screening Hitchcock’s initial dailies from location, Paramount sent the director emergency telegrams urging him to shoot “rear projection plates” of all the scenery, and save the close-ups for Hollywood. Doc Ericksen carried the telegrams around in his pocket for a day or two, trying to decide how best to tell Hitchcock that the studio was advising him to proceed basically as a second unit. Finally, after dinner and drinks one night, Coleman handed him the telegrams. Hitchcock took one look, stuffed them in his back pocket, and said, “Okay, now you’ve shown them to me.”
But as he often did, Hitchcock took the compromise as a challenge—shooting both close-ups and rear projection plates on location, and then back at Paramount shooting alternative close-ups against the plates. The final blend of reality and artifice was left to postproduction, and to
Robert Burks, Joseph MacMillan Johnson, and John P. Fulton. Throughout the 1950s the demands of VistaVision would force Hitchcock to rely on this old-fashioned method of matching close-ups with process plates—and thereby create an almost accidental consistency between his British and American films, one that has intrigued critics over the years. In the English half of Hitchcock’s career, it was a technique largely dictated by climate and budget; during his U.S. peak, ironically, these “canned” backgrounds were a holdover dictated by the need for wide-screen clarity. According to associates, although such process shots became a hallmark of his style, Hitchcock hated having to constantly resort to them.
Hitchcock’s schedule was arranged to allow him to promote the British release of
Dial M for Murder
in London, and to bring
Rear Window
to the annual Cannes Film Festival on his way to Nice in the last week of May. John Michael Hayes was already registered at the Carlton, revising against the clock. “The condition of the script is not good,” Doc Ericksen reported to a Paramount official in Hollywood. Hitchcock wanted better dialogue; there were last-minute emendations for Bertani, and an important improvement for the scene where Robie and Danielle swim out to the hotel float for a talk. Francie was brought into the scene for her only confrontation with Danielle—a highlight of the film, adding comedy and triangular tension.
The first shots of Hitchcock’s British
The Man Who Knew Too Much
featured travel posters for Switzerland. Brochures advertising Naples, Venice, Paris, and Monte Carlo told the audience where Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine honeymooned in
Suspicion.
And now the first shot of
To Catch a Thief
would show the sidewalk window of a travel bureau. “If you love life, you’ll love France,” one slogan beckons.
Rear Window
, the director’s experiment in microcosm, would be the last film for a long time that Hitchcock would craft entirely inside a studio. Paramount was the first studio to let him—and his films—do what he had always wanted: roam the world.
If
Rear Window
was an intentionally serious film,
To Catch a Thief
was a deliberately larky one—an opportunity for Hitchcock to put the world’s finest cuisine on the studio tab while he and the audience enjoyed “travel folder heaven” (as John Williams describes the surroundings in the film); an excuse for audiences to luxuriate in the sight, every bit as heavenly, of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in prime condition, circling each other romantically. It was a showcase of “beautiful people, beautiful scenery, a love story and suspense”—the unofficial philosophy of Hitchcock’s Paramount films, according to Herbert Coleman.
Having eschewed the Method of Elia Kazan for the “personality acting” of Hitchcock, Kelly continued to blossom as an actress, more than holding her own in playful love scenes with Cary Grant, who had been at the job much longer—almost a quarter century. “I was awed by her,” said Grant later. “We all loved her very much.”
More than in
Rear Window
, even, Hitchcock’s camera seemed in love with Kelly. The stunning actress worked and played hard, both virtues the director admired. She had her acting coach, Elsie Foulstone, on location, and rehearsed her lines over and over. Whatever went on beneath the surface, she radiated serenity during filming—and after hours made time for fashion designer Oleg Cassini, with whom she was engaged in a torrid affair. Though everyone held their breath, off-camera she didn’t even flirt with Cary Grant.
Cassini sometimes joined Kelly, the Cary Grants, and the Hitchcocks for dinner after a day of shooting. The director “had one of the most curious eating habits,” Cassini recalled in his autobiography. “His diet consisted of one spectacular meal each day. He would fast until evening, drinking only water during the filming. Then he would take a bath and we would gather for dinner at the restaurant of his choice, for the precise meal of his choice.”
Cassini was just passing through; Edith Head was the film’s costume designer, and
To Catch a Thief
was a “costume designer’s dream,” in her words. Again, Hitchcock gave her precise instructions for what Kelly should wear, but advised her to leave the leading man alone. “Hitch trusted me implicitly to select my own wardrobe,” Grant recalled. “If he wanted me to wear something very specific he would tell me, but generally I wore simple, tasteful clothes—the same kind of clothes I wear off screen.”
Hitchcock wouldn’t allow a revealing bikini, any more than censors, so Head was instructed to buy tasteful knockouts in Paris swimwear shops. Kelly’s polka-dot bathing suit is straight out of the novel—one of the details Hitchcock had mentally underlined in the reading.
The annual
fin de saison
Bal de Biarritz is also noted in the novel, though in only a brief mention. Hitchcock turned the gala occasion into the film’s extended climax, which weaves together the various threads of the story: the Resistance cabal on the spot, catering to the idle rich in masquerade; the insurance agent drawn into the intrigue; and the final jewel heist, which forces Robie to chase down the real culprit on a rooftop.
It didn’t escape the director that an eighteenth-century-themed costume ball would give Head the chance to garb his leading lady in something eye-popping. He envisioned Kelly in shimmering gold (“Hitchcock told me that he wanted her to look like a princess,” said Head), and Head came
up with the delicate gold-mesh dress, wig, and mask that helped get her an Oscar nomination in 1954—an award Head always felt, bitterly, she should have won.
*
To Catch a Thief was
a blend of genres—comedy, romance, suspense—and the leading man was also an unclassifiable blend. Hitchcock’s roles for Cary Grant always drew on his ambivalence toward women. In
Suspicion
, Grant plays an apparent cad who wants to kill his wife; in
Notorious
, he can’t bring himself to believe in love. Now Grant was cast as a lone wolf, a man every bit as tense, self-absorbed, and narcissistic as the actor himself. That’s the way Robie is in the book, but even more so in the film, where he is so preoccupied by the copycat thefts that most of the time he doesn’t even pretend to like Danielle or Francie. (“What a signal girl!” he says sarcastically of the latter. “A jackpot of admirable character traits.”) The romantic comedy was twice as funny coming from such a grudging lead.
For Grant, each film role was a possible dirty trick that was being played on him, a dubious opponent that had to be outmaneuvered. The handsome star knew his value to Hollywood, to Hitchcock, and to
To Catch a Thief.
Hitchcock “likes me a lot, but at the same time he detests me,” he confided to costar Brigitte Auber. “He would like to be in my place. He’d very much like to be in my place, because he can
imagine
himself in my place.”
His “place” included privileges above the other actors. Grant’s contract called for an air-conditioned limousine—either Lincoln or Cadillac—with liveried chauffeur, specially ordered from England and delivered to France. The arrival of the car then had to be timed ceremoniously to coincide with the star’s own arrival on location, so Grant could make a show of flattered surprise. After a week or two of the limousine, however, Grant complained to Doc Ericksen that the car made him appear pretentious; suspecting that his fellow cast members were starting to resent him, he demanded a roadster with a young driver in street clothing. The limousine was returned, the roadster with driver requisitioned. After a week or two with the roadster, Grant came back to the production manager and demanded, “Where’s my limousine?” At great expense, the limousine was airlifted back.