Send a thief to catch a thief

John Robie (Cary Grant) is a ex-jewel thief that was known as the cat. We find this out when a newspaper is zoomed up on in his villa, an interesting way to find out the plot of a movie. He climbed up walls over roofs and disappeared in the night, just like a cat could. Someone starts imitating his robberies and he naturally gets blamed for them. He decides to set off to catch the real thief in order to prove his innocence. Because the new thief had been imitating him so well he figured he could anticipate his actions, plan his moves and catch him in the act.

John finds and explains his situation to Mr. Houston (John Williams), an insurance agent. Mr. Houston is amused by the idea stating that "only an honest man could be so foolish." He gets a list of names of people that are living on the Rivera that have jewelry that is worth stealing.

From this list he meets Frances (Grace Kelly) and Jessie Stevens (Jessie Royce Landis). He introduces himself as Mr. Burns an American lumberman over for a vacation. John gets romantically involved with Frances in order to track the cat by her mother's jewelry. Frances thinks he's after her mother's jewelry, because she know who he really is and all about his days of stealing.

John has a lot riding against him in his quest to prove his innocence. His old resistance friends want him dead, the police want him in jail and the real cat wants him out of town. He was only given ten days by the police in which to prove his innocence. If he is caught for the robbery while trying to catch the real cat no one would have believed what he said.

Whenever there is a robbery you see a black cat walk on the roof of the villa that is being robbed. Then you see a silhouette of someone in the villa dressed all in black sneaking around stealing the jewelry. The person is intriguing, the movie keeps us thinking the entire time who is the real thief? You find out at the end when they go to the annual Stanford gala, a costume ball.

Alfred Hitchcock wouldn't let Grace Kelly wear her glasses in the driving scenes he thought she wouldn't look as beautiful or fashionable. That's why she was squinting and seemed to be an extremely reckless driver. It did unfortunately come to foreshadow her own death by getting into a car accident driving on those same winding roads. Cary and Grace joked about the driving scenes for years when he turned ghostly white despite his deep set tan.

There are a lot of scenes in this movie that closely resemble scenes in other Hitchcock films. The opening of the lady screaming about her jewels being stolen is like the opening scenes of Murder where a lady is screaming. The picnic scene has a lot of sexual tension related to food like in Notorious. Hitchcock had a food fetish, he loved food to the point where he thought that it was like sex in the beginning half of his career. In the later half he filmed his murder scenes like love scenes and his love scenes like murder scenes.