To Catch a Thief "The New Yorker" dismissed the film as "an Alfred Hitchcock picture that makes you wonder what has happened to the man ... As the heiress, Grace Kelly is very pretty. She does not, presumably, try to act." "The Monthly Film Bulletin" wrote, "Even a comedy thriller needs considerably more in the way of plain excitement and tension than "To Catch a Thief" provides, and Hitchcock's celebrated habit of playing tricks with the audience ... seem a poor substitute for the real thing." "The Guardian" called the film "a thorough disappointment," writing that Hitchcock had "failed so completely that one can
To Catch a Thief only wonder if, in this tale of high-class burglary on the Côte d'Azur, he has not altogether abandoned his devotion to 'tension.' Certainly the 'whodunnit' element in this film is remarkably slack; the unmasking of the master criminal, which is the climax of the story, comes as mildly as bread and milk." The film presently holds a score of 95% on the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes based on 44 reviews, with the critical consensus reading: "It may occasionally be guilty of coasting on pure charm, but "To Catch a Thief" has it in spades -- as well as a pair