Mother will love it here

Excellent film with a great cast who are all dead now. Enjoy

acting when it was so engaging.

Adventure, drama, and a little history

With Hitchcock directing Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, you already know it's going to be a stylish and suspenseful story. The short form of that story is that Grant is a reformed (so he says) jewel thief, out of prison on sufferance, and thefts start to happen with exact matches to his trademark modus operandi. Kelly shows up as a moneyed debutante and dilettante, someone who seems to think he's an attraction, like a carnival ride, placed for her amusement. If she can just find where to put a quarter in the slot, he'll put on his amusing show for her. Then the ride stops being fun when it's her suite that's robbed.

Grant, Kelly, and Hitchcock (including his famous cameo, out of the way early so people will just watch the movie) make this a classic. So does the time in which the movie was made - the current day, for its initial audience, with WWII still fresh in memory. That acts as a backdrop for some of the tension. Part of it takes place in a bistro where the staff's backgrounds are as checkered as the tablecloths, but their shady pasts (like Grant's) are forgivable because they were heroes in the French resistance. When Grant's supposed relapse into crime threatens their paroles, it adds one more force to the dramatic convergence.

Other points identify this movie as a product of its time, including the effects-free chase across rooftops and mostly-believable athletic feats. Anyone accustomed to MI3 standards will find it comical or somnolent. Still the style is true to its time, and a lot more true to what un-wired people could credibly do.

It's a good movie from another age - but it really is of another age. Modern viewers will see it as retro or nostalgic, when it was meant to be immediate and thrilling. But mostly, it's still a good movie.

-- wiredweird

In the time of the gentleman thief

Take a French Riviera retired semi-Robin Hood type jewel thief (Cary Grant). Take a young American heiress on the loose looking for that one good man that her crowd doesn't provide (Grace Kelly). Take an unknown cat thief who is using all of the Cary's old tricks to loot the rich and famous. Put that plot in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock and you have the basis for a sophisticated suspense thriller a la the 1950's. Cary must defend his honor and retire that new thief on the block. Right? A little romance and other high jinxes along the way move the film along but in the end you know justice (and love) will be served.