To Catch a Thief (1955)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
When a string of jewel robberies hits the French Riviera, suspicion falls on retired thief John “The Cat” Robie. To clear his name, he sets out to trap the copycat himself—entangling a wealthy widow and her beguiling daughter in a seductive game of pursuit, deception, and desire.
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What critics compared To Catch a Thief to
Showing off your stars, ogling the Grand Canal and draping everyone in Colleen Atwood’s glamorous threads is not enough in itself to pass as Hitchcock homage, unless your favourite Hitchcock film is To Catch a Thief.
There was a moment when I thought maybe "The Tourist" could be like one of Hitchcock's fun, elegant thrillers like "To Catch a Thief."
What it was not, however, was a particularly dazzling piece of filmmaking, which makes von Donnersmarck precisely the wrong guy to direct The Tourist, a cosmopolitan trifle along the lines of Charade or Alfred Hitchcocks To Catch A Thief.
And then, if you're thinking about The Tourist, with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie (who were perhaps thinking about Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, and Audrey Hepburn), well, think about adding To Catch a Thief or Charade to your Netflix queue instead.
At times, it tries too hard to capture the style of Hitchcock classics like "To Catch A Thief" and "North By Northwest".
There the film turns into a misguided iteration of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1955 romp “To Catch a Thief,” complete with a ball.
It's a jaunty mix of light suspense, romance and comedy in the vein of To Catch a Thief or Donen's Hitchcock pastiches.
Contemporary audiences are less likely to be reminded of Charade and To Catch a Thief than that other Grant wannabe, George Clooney, in the Oceans movies, but it’s a change of pace.
Since Focus conjures up a more relaxed time in Hollywood history, when the top stars radiated their golden appeal in romantic comedies about duplicitous souls, writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa might have dreamed of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, who paired in Alfred Hitchcock's 1955 To Catch a Thief.
They set Focus up in the manner of Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief or North By Northwest .
Directed by James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line) from a screenplay by Patrick O'Neill, Knight and Day makes a laboured attempt at Hitchcockian wit and glamour in the mode of To Catch a Thief or North by Northwest.
A genial romantic thriller that very much wants to be in the mold of such Alfred Hitchcock entertainments as "North by Northwest" and "To Catch a Thief," or even Stanley Donen 's "Charade," "Knight and Day" is inevitably light on plausibility but, with Cameron Diaz , Peter Sarsgaard , Viola Davis and Paul Dano joining Cruise, it is strong in the acting department.
What is perhaps most dispiriting about Knight and Day is what it suggests about Hollywood and the comedy-thriller-romance subgenre, a hybrid once responsible for such ineffable delights as Charade and To Catch a Thief.
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There's a lot of latter-day Hitch on display here, To Catch a Thief and Frenzy, and even a touch of Ren� Cl�ment, who last adapted the Highsmith novel and called it Plein soleil (Purple Noon).
It nearly rivals Hitchcock’s nail-biting opener in “To Catch a Thief.”
Surface gloss is what you get in this caper-romance, pale beside To Catch a Thief, whose beautiful-star power and life-of-the-super-wealthy backdrops it copies, in great part because its actors lack the elegant wit and sparkle of Hitchcocks.
Story-wise it is a patchwork pastiche of To Catch A Thief , Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Bond, with a bit of National Treasure and Raiders Of The Lost Ark thrown in for good measure (Ryan Reynolds even whistles the Raiders theme at one point).
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This decision by director Martin Campbell ( GoldenEye) and his writers (Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Paul Haggis) to tilt Bond more toward Get Carter brutishness, rather than To Catch a Thief charm, is a calculated risk -- nobody would call Craig "suave."
Maybe you never saw Love At First Bite or The Brady Bunch Movie (it seems like Tim Burton didn't bother to watch them either -- or maybe he watched them too much and decided to make his own versions).
There's the faintest whiff of ''To Catch a Thief" and ''North By Northwest."