To Catch a Thief

Well Rick D., you and I can enjoy half of the picture. (I suppose Cary Grant wasn't bad looking, either.) Anyway, I bought "To Catch a Thief" a few nights ago and watched it. This was against my general desire not to buy DVD's anymore, having had my faithful factotum (and Soviet emigre), Mikhail Kolinovich, donate a whole trashbag full of old ones to the local library while I was in Europe. This was part of an effort to clean up my apartment. I am thinking of trying the NetFlix thing, but anyway, I am making an exception for classic movies - keeping and, occasionally, buying ones which I know I will watch over and over. And that is the thing with movies. I generally find that I can watch them once - maybe twice - before I am bored to tears. If I can watch a movie many times, I know it was well made.

Of course, this is the case with anything "classic," but I sometimes wonder if movies are different. Is it something intrinsic to them, or is it that it is a relatively new art form (approx. 100 years old), or is it that there would have been just as many, say, bad novels at any given point in time as bad movies - is it just that there is such a backlog of good novels now that we can focus exclusively on these? I don't know. At any rate, I often find that good movies are "idiomatic," that is, they use the idiom of film which is VISUAL.

This is why, differing from some of my friends, I do not think that the film version of "Brideshead Revisited" is a great MOVIE. I think it is a very enjoyable, competent, and faithful rendering of a great NOVEL. I have watched it many times - except for that one unpleasant scene which really was unnecessary - and it has not worn thin. This is because it is well made. However, all the talk about "how faithful it is to the novel" with the voice-overs taken word for word from the book, I think misses the point. A novel, obviously, is about words: dialogue and descriptions. A film, though it can have dialogue, succeeds to the extent to which there is a skillful manipulation of visual imagery.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the director of "Brideshead" (I forget his name) was given a job to do, and he did it extremely well. That is life. My hat is off to him. What I am saying is that this is a movie that is lower in the hierarchy of "cinematic greatness" than say, a Fellini or some Hitchcock films, because it does not exploit as fully the idiom of film, which is primarily visual.

This brings me to the movie at hand. First, Grace Kelly . . . . . .(sigh) . . . . . . well, let's move on. Actually, I did not think that this was one of Hitchcock's best films. There are no incredibly arresting scenes as in movies like "North by Northwest" or "Topaz." I am thinking of the scene in "North by Northwest" of Carey Grant standing on one side of the country road across from the other man waiting for the bus. They are totally, absolutely alone together, but they are not together - they might as well be two anonymous commuters in New York City - they themselves are social islands within a desolate landscape; or the scene in "Topaz" where the attractive Cuban spy is shot and the camera from above shows her falling and her long dress unfurling on the ground, like a flower opening. She is still beautiful, even in death. However, to try to "explain" these visual symbols does them a minor injustice. There are more layers of meaning to them AND like any good symbol, artistic or liturgical, they are more than just their explantion(s) - which a certain type of literal-minded person has trouble understanding - they simply ARE.

You cannot say, "Oh, now I know what the symbol means, therefore I can dispense with it." It is more than the sum total of its rational explanations. A profound symbol is inexaustible - and it exists, in a sense, for its own sake. It is irreplaceable.

"To Catch a Thief" is not one of Hitchcock's "Best Movies," but it is one of his "Better Movies." A decent enough basic plot with interesting twists, good camera angles and composition, a believable enough character development and interaction given certain conventions of 1950's movies. (Really, a 51 year old man being PURSUED by two young women, ages 26 and 18, may give some of us hope, but lacks a certain versimilitude. Although given Mr. Grant's looks and wit and the convention, it seems to work for some reason on the silver screen. And it doesn't seem in any way "dirty." "Foolishly romantic," perhaps, but not dirty.) And the wit, style and (natural) grace of Grant and Kelly are what really make the movie enjoyable. And it does end in marriage - certain "implied" pre-nuptial shenanigans to the contrary. Of course I am referring to the famous "fireworks" scene, but one has to admire Mr. Hitchcock's creative response to the censors. And the fact that there were censors, who may have forced him to be creative. Had they not existed, would we have simply gotten 5 minutes of pornography instead? One hopes not, but still wonders.

On the plane home from Europe, I watched a contemporary movie which I described to myself as, "a bunch of self-centered twits in bad clothes." "But I am 38 and I NEED to have a baby," says one of the characters. So she decides she will have one with her current boyfriend, but - apparently this gal thinks she has standards - so decides he is not good enough. Then she finds another guy, whom she decides isn't good enough, but, when he takes her ailing father to his doctor's appointment she decides, "he'll do." Of course there was no talk of marriage - and they were such self-righteous, unappealing characters (in bad clothes) - but the whole thing was presented as if it were "touching."

Anyway, watch "To Catch a Thief." It is much better.