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 (novel) in a movie set in the 1950s. In 2011, the novel was dramatized as a "Saturday Play", which was broadcast on 8 January on BBC Radio 4. To Catch a Thief (novel) To Catch a Thief is a 1952 thriller novel by David F. Dodge. The scene is the French Riviera, and the time is 1951. In August 1951, French police come to arrest American John Robie at his villa in Vence near the Côte d'Azur. He escapes, leaping over the garden wall. In the late 1930s, Robie was a daring, supremely athletic burglar, known as "Le Chat" ("the cat"),