During my relatively inattentive viewing of TO CATCH A THIEF, as I breakfasted in bed this morning, I noticed lots of details that I didn't remember from my last viewing of the film, many years ago...... little oddities and parallels, and out of place gritty nonpareils in this otherwise smooth creamy truffle of a movie.....Cary Grant was actually older than Jessie Royce Landis, yet Landis is treated as an "older woman", whereas Grant is presented as a 'suitable suitor' for Landis' daughter in the film, Grace Kelly.....Kelly's character makes snidely impolitic remarks regarding Brigitte Auber's 'young' character when, in fact, the actresses were practically the same age.....Double entendres abound, in typical Hitchcock style....after a high speed elusive car chase.....Kelly driving at breakneck speed (interesting parallel with her real-life death, incidentally) as Grant nervously rubs his own thighs....(erotic play in the sexually repressive 1950's)....then stopping for a 'snack'.....Kelly asking Grant if he'd prefer a leg or breast, as she offers him a box of fried chicken......I couldn't keep from making a parallel with the Cannes police department's quickly pinning a crime on a one-legged man who was innocent.....(how could a peg-legged man scramble over clay-tiled rooftops, like a cat) and the recent news events in Ferguson?)......reflecting human's quickness to blame the less desirable, while dismissing the moral morass of the beautiful and glamorous... and, I can't resist saying that I thought Edith Head's costumes, on vulgar display at the film's ball on the Cote d'Azur, didn't deserve an Academy Award, although the popular public opinion was that she had been 'cheated'......{ahem....weren't Georges Annenkov (for The Earrings of Madame de... ) and Jean Louis and Christian Dior in the mix of nominations that year?.....Kelly and Landis look like Vegas showgirls masquerading as Liberaces in technicolor "Head" drag......
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