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) 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"), who specialized in jewel thefts from hotels and villas on the French Riviera. He was caught and sent to prison in 1939. But during the German occupation