To Catch a Thief

Alfred Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, east London, in 1899, the son of a greengrocer, and entered the film industry in 1919 designing title cards before directing his first film, The Pleasure Garden, in 1925. By the early 1930s he was already known in Britain as the "master of suspense" for films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps, and in 1939 producer David O. Selznick brought him to Hollywood, where Rebecca (1940) won the Academy Award for Best Picture in his first American year. Over the following four decades Hitchcock built the most recognisable directorial identity in commercial cinema: the audience implicated in guilt and voyeurism, the ordinary man wrongly accused, the blonde heroine in danger, and a visual grammar of subjective camera and precise editing that he called "pure cinema." He was equally shrewd about his own image, hosting Alfred Hitchcock Presents on television from 1955 and cultivating the silhouette and deadpan persona that made him one of the few directors as famous as his stars. His four films with Cary Grant, spread across eighteen years, form one of the most studied actor-director partnerships in film history. Hitchcock used Grant's established charm as raw material to be complicated and, at times, weaponised — casting him as a possible wife-murderer in Suspicion, a compromised government agent in Notorious, a reformed jewel thief in To Catch a Thief, and an innocent man mistaken for a spy in North by Northwest. Each film asked audiences to hold their trust in Grant's likability against genuine suspicion of his character, a tension only Hitchcock exploited so directly. Hitchcock received an Academy Honorary Award in 1968 and was knighted shortly before his death in 1980, closing a career that had produced more influential and imitated films than perhaps any director's in the history of the medium.

Grace Kelly rose from a brief career as a New York model and stage actress to major Hollywood stardom in just a few years during the early 1950s, becoming closely associated with Alfred Hitchcock, who directed her in three films between 1954 and 1955. Her cool, poised screen persona made her one of the defining leading women of the decade despite a career that lasted barely five years. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for "The Country Girl" (1954), a dramatic role that stood apart from the glamorous parts for which she was better known, beating Judy Garland's widely favored performance in "A Star Is Born" that year. In 1955, while filming "To Catch a Thief" on location in the south of France with Cary Grant, Kelly met Prince Rainier III of Monaco; she married him in April 1956 in a globally televised ceremony and retired from acting to become Princess of Monaco, ending her film career at its peak. She died in a car accident in Monaco in 1982.

Robert Burks was born in Chino, California, in 1909 and became Alfred Hitchcock's regular cinematographer, shooting twelve of the director's films across thirteen years from Strangers on a Train (1951) to Marnie (1964), a run interrupted only by Psycho, which Hitchcock shot with his television crew. Burks photographed two of the films that most fixed Grant's screen image in its final, most polished form. To Catch a Thief (1955), shot largely on location on the French Riviera opposite Grace Kelly, used Burks's VistaVision color photography to turn Grant, at fifty-one, into an image of tanned, tailored ease against the Mediterranean coastline; the film won Burks the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. North by Northwest (1959) followed, its widescreen compositions — the Mount Rushmore climax, the crop-duster sequence shot on an open Indiana highway — becoming some of the most recognizable images in Grant's entire career. Burks's other credits with Hitchcock include Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958) and The Birds (1963), giving him a hand in shaping the visual identity of Hitchcock's most celebrated decade. He worked in Technicolor, VistaVision and a range of aspect ratios, adapting his lighting and camera style to each film's demands rather than imposing a single signature look. Burks died in a house fire in Fresno, California, in 1968, along with his wife, ending a partnership with Hitchcock that had defined an era of American studio cinematography.