If Rear Window is Hitchcock's "testament" movie to that point in 1954 (post-North by Northwest, the term no longer has much meaning), then To Catch a Thief, appearing just a year later, recovers the only element missing from Hitchcock's black chest in Rear Window's exhausting exhumation: homosexuality. Note the way that Cary Grant's cat burglar John Robie is greeted by a former accomplice in scenic Nice: as Grant descends a staircase to an outdoor café run by all the reformed dregs of society once involved with Robie and now resentful that Robie appears to be back on the prowl, the head waiter pops a champagne cork in the first of several ejaculatory similes. I do wonder whether the entire film could in fact be read as a gay "reclamation"--its most famous sequence, the juxtaposition of the central seduction sequence with fireworks over Cannes, begins with Robie being teased for his asexuality, recalling an earlier flirtation with rival Danielle (Brigitte Auber) that ends with Robie asking her to cover her legs. More blatantly, Robie is approached by a muscle stud on the beach as Grace Kelly lounges in the background; and when offered on a picnic the choice between a "breast or a leg," Robie demurs, "You make the choice." Clever double entendres, no question, but what exactly is the second "understanding" that we come to in this series of innuendos? Moreover, what to make of the mother figure, reappearing at key erotic moments in body or direct reference (indeed, Kelly's Frances accuses Robie of thinking of her mother during their first kiss) and comprising the punchline of the picture as Frances threatens to make them a household of three (a literal "ménage a trios"--particularly given the film's setting). That kind of mother-love doesn't reach its apotheosis until Psycho five years hence, but there's something along the way to Hitch's complex Oedipal materphobia that suggests here a certain Freudian gay arrest.

To Catch a Thief may predict Psycho, but it predicts Vertigo more flamboyantly in its vertiginous rooftop pursuits, rescue (successful this time) of someone about to fall from one said rooftop, ambivalent romantic hero pulled from retirement, and "Midge"-type (Danielle, who, like Midge of Vertigo, assumes different identities as she morphs herself--unsuccessfully--from tomboy Girl Friday to sexual object choice). Though Vertigo never implies that Scottie's disinterest in Midge is because of his orientation, there is the suggestion in To Catch a Thief that something's not entirely "square" about this beautiful, well-dressed bachelor living alone in a well-appointed French villa. Consider, too, the play of jewels as aphrodisiacal totems for Robie--the entire prelude to the fireworks-seduction scene, lit brilliantly by the great Robert Burks, features Frances' face shrouded in shadow and her diamond necklace twinkling against her cleavage. To backtrack: Robie, an ex-jewel thief, is called out when a new rash of burglaries along the Riviera make him the target of police and the criminal underground's fury for the police's renewed interest in them. He hatches a plan with insurance agent Hughson (John Williams) to "case" potential victims, among them brassy nouveau riche socialite Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis) and her daughter Frances. That Robie's association with Frances is only through the deception and "wooing" of her mother hints again at that odd, Norman Bates-ian mommy-obsession; that Robie's association with the mother has mainly to do with her (sexualized) jewels leads logically to the "morning after" sequence in which Frances, having consummated her physical relationship with Robie, accuses him of stealing her mother's things during the carnal night. The idea--contemporary with this period's pop psychology craze--is that Robie is frozen at a pre-Oedipal stage prior to sexual maturity. Of all the films To Catch a Thief presages thematically, in its crime-as-catalyst-to-sexual-maturation bit, one can go so far as to find elements from 1967's Bonnie & Clyde.

Being ahead of its time, being creepy as hell in counterpoint to the cheery "vacation movie" atmosphere of it in the trademark Hitchcock way--even being, technically speaking, a near-perfect picture (take note of the numerous rack focuses during the fireworks scene, edited to give off a slightly disorienting, unpleasant feeling), however, doesn't make To Catch a Thief that great a film. Decidedly light, it feels tossed-off, an afterthought--every bit the lark Grant wanted his movies to seem. The entire film is the MacGuffin. Small wonder there's more interest in it extratextually: as the picture that brought Grant back from the brink of retirement; as the one with the stretch of road on which Grace Kelly was rumoured to die as Princess Grace of Monaco in three decades' time; not to mention as the last film Kelly would make before graduating from Hollywood to actual Royalty. Its only Oscar for Burks' cinematography, To Catch a Thief is a collection of VistaVision postcards; its location panoramas are breathtaking and its early helicopter camerawork manages to turn an endless car chase into a tedious walk in the park. Unusual for Hitchcock's later pictures, if usual for this mid-fifties' tear (The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and, I'm afraid, Rear Window), To Catch a Thief is really interested in looking at itself. Not a problem when the film is about looking (like Rear Window), but a problem when it's not. To Catch a Thief only means anything in the greater context of Hitchcock's twilight masterpieces.

Paramount reissues To Catch a Thief on DVD in a Special Collector's Edition sporting a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. While the image isn't exactly poised to impress, it's simply dazzling when judged against the previous disc's transfer. Moiré patterns are still an issue thanks to that damn striped shirt of Robie's, but the source print is cleaner and the colours are no longer so stale. In general, it looks like a newer film in this incarnation. Meanwhile, despite the addition of a 2.0 surround option, the Dolby Digital audio is as before: nothing special. Laurent Bouzereau and Peter Bogdanovich collaborate on a yakker that's condescending and self-aggrandizing in equal measure. Bogdanovich does his Hitchcock impression (and his Hawks impression, and his Grant impression), calls everyone by his or her first name, and points out when "Cary" laughs the most naturally. In-between, he recalls how charming Grant was and, as Bouzereau James Liptons him repeatedly, recounts set visits and other personal anecdotes that simultaneously demean the film as it unfolds and position Bogdanovich as the #1 asshole namedropper of the universe. Three featurettes ported over from the original DVD begin with a retrospective making-of (16 mins.) that has granddaughter Mary Stone and daughter Pat Hitchcock painting an astonishingly rosy picture of the Master, which if nothing else says something good about how Hitch was with his family. I don't know that blood relatives are the best people to talk about someone's work--I don't even know that being that someone helps. Case in point: "An Appreciation" (7 mins.), in which Stone confesses she had grandpa ghost write a paper for a college Hitchcock course that received a "C." "I'm sorry, that's the best I could do," he told her. It's funny but it's also telling in that just because you made it doesn't necessarily mean you have any idea of what you made. "Writing and Casting" (9 mins.) is self-explanatory, while a short piece on Edith Head (13 mins.) is another hagiography in what feels like a parade of hagiographies. At least they didn't ask Shyamalan to contribute. A theatrical trailer rounds out the presentation.-

1.78:1 (16x9); English Dolby Surround, English Mono, French Mono; CC; English; DVD-9; 106 minutes; Paramount

Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is Alfred Hitchcock's most mercurial anti-hero, the soup bone reduction of the Master's wrong-man theme. An advertising executive so at ease with changing his identity at the fall of a hammer, he has, by film's end, become/done all of the things he's wrongfully accused of being/doing at the beginning of the film. Indeed, Hitchcock would never again mine the idea of the wrong man with this kind of heat--veering off as he did into a more metaphysical kind of guilt transference à la Vertigo with The Birds, Psycho, and Marnie. As North by Northwest opens, Thornhill gives his regards to a night porter's wife ("We're not talkin'!"), steals a cab from a Good Samaritan, and instructs his secretary to send a neglected lover a box of gold-wrapped candy because "she'll think she's eating money." He's a charmer--and he's as oily, despicable, and fast-talking as almost every one of Grant's romantic comedy heroes. Hitch undermines and exploits Grant for the fourth and final time here as a guy we love until we stop for a second to catch our breath and take stock of the myriad ways in which we've been bribed, glad-handed, misled, and led-on.

Colour is of primary importance in North by Northwest, as are the names of liminal places (each suggesting transformation) and the ways that Hitchcock has decided to demonstrate that people are reducible to numbers, money, items, and, in an idea heretical during the Eisenhower era, the equivalently shady idea of patriotism. ("If this is how we win cold wars, maybe we better start losing a few.") Saul Bass' opening credit sequence--lines at angles bisecting one another that resolve into the face of a Madison Avenue skyscraper--always looked to me like a ledger, and as the picture progresses, Ernest Lehman's screenplay takes pains to assign explicit room numbers, car train numbers, addresses, telephone numbers, and, finally, auction prices that Thornhill corrupts to effect his escape. (Eva Marie Saint's femme fatale Eve Kendall, for instance, is usually found in places the number sum of which is thirteen: car 3901, hotel room 463; Thornhill, meanwhile, is apprehended on a "code 76.") Consistently on the left, "weak" side of the screen until the finale in which he enacts the only positive motion of the film, Thornhill is clad throughout in a blue-grey suit, colours that denote ambiguity and the protean nature of the wearer. See how Hitchcock uses blue (especially on the side of a Zephyr truck that obscures Thornhill at the Prairie Stop/crop-duster scene), then red (for the fallen woman), then white (for the freshly knighted knight errant).

Perhaps the most breezily enjoyable of any Hitchcock for the mousetrap concision of its narrative and the breathtaking technical proficiency of its performances and direction, North by Northwest is thought by many to be the quintessential Hitchcock film for its adherence to nearly every one of Hitchcock's themes up to this point. It explores the unreliability of written language in ways wry (Thornhill's life and staged-death affirmed by "the quiet authority of the written word") and literal (as when a message hidden in a matchbook is intercepted by the enemy), the wrong man problem afflicting a wrong man who's actually more comfortable as an Odyssean nobody (the "O" in his monogram ROT stands for "nothing"--and decomposition), drinking as a means to metastasis, sexual ambiguity on the part of villain Van Damme (James Mason) and his henchman Leonard (Martin "Call It My Woman's Intuition" Landau), and the ideological defacing of national monuments (Mt. Rushmore and the United Nations building). Indeed, North by Northwest is something of a kinetic remake of Notorious that recasts the monstrous mother (Jessie Royce Landis) as a woman with Elizabeth Taylor's hooker's phone number--Butterfield-8 being bought off by her son for fifty bucks to do something illegal.

But North by Northwest is more than a clearing house of Hitchcock's auteur tendencies: it's neither a self-homage nor a shrine, but rather a devilishly complex pre-post-modern beast rumbling along on its style and self-knowledge with an energy more exhilarating than enervating. Its set-pieces are self-contained and wondrously illogical (indeed, the film was pitched on the strength of a scant three hastily-sketched scenarios: a murder at the UN; a chase across Mt. Rushmore; and a scene at an automobile plant), and at the end comes the understanding that were you ever given a moment for contemplation, the whole confection would fall like a house of cards. North by Northwest is Hitchcock at his most entertaining and contemptuous--a response to the failure the year before of Vertigo and the last time he really gave a shit about what the audience thought of his pictures. The success of this one, after all, lubricated the way for the highly personal films that would make Hitchcock a legend as opposed to a mere genius.

Warner outdoes itself with a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen DVD transfer of North by Northwest that, aided by Lowry Digital's computer-restoration techniques, rediscovers the astonishing VistaVision detail and clarity of Robert Burks' cinematography. That Eve's eyes are moist during the auction sequence is one of those details that says everything without saying anything--and this is the first time I ever noticed them. Amazing. The DD 5.1 remix presents dialogue and Bernard Herrmann's extraordinary score--sourced from the original stereo masters--in distinct channels to good, if subdued, effect. On another track, a feature-length commentary from screenwriter Lehman is useless, really, unless you care what Lehman thinks works and doesn't work about a film that doesn't justify a whole lot of criticism. Lots of long silences mark the yakker (never a good sign), but I was pleased to learn that it was Herrmann who first introduced Lehman to Hitchcock.

"Destination Hitchcock" (40 mins.) is an excellent making-of documentary produced and directed by Peter Fitzgerald that features Saint as the host of a well- organized and edited series of ruminations from the usual suspects about the genesis and backstory of the picture. I liked Saint's still-fresh pleasure at being cast as a sexpot for the first time in her career and the tales of how Hitchcock convinced the MGM heads that he had a fully-functional screenplay when, in truth, at the time of his pitch he had around twenty-minutes worth of material. Lehman is more interesting here than he is in the commentary, spinning a couple of nice yarns regarding the spontaneous generation of a few scenes with his back against the wall and writer's block holding his sack in a vice. Old stories as well of how Hitch secretly filmed the UN building from a carpet-cleaning truck hiding a giant VistaVision camera in its back are given new life here in what should be the definitive casual documentary of the production. Rounding out the stellar package: a 40+ behind-the-scenes/promotional art stills gallery; a television spot (1 mins.), b&w and nifty; an option to watch the film with Herrmann's score isolated; a theatrical trailer featuring some of the great early production art on the piece, remastered and still striking; and the trademark jokey trailer Hitchcock prepared for North by Northwest.-

1.78:1 (16x9); English DD 5.1, French Mono; English CC; English, French subtitles; DVD-9; 136 minutes; Warner