The Most Gorgeous Hitchcock Film -- in Green

Elsewhere on this board I salute "To Catch a Thief" for its gorgeous, perfectly matched star pair(Grant and Kelly.)

And I think I noted in that post how To Catch a Thief won the only Best Cinematography award ever given to a Hitchcock picture -- and, appropriately enough, to Robert burks, the DP who filmed every Hitchcock movie from Strangers on a Train to Marnie(less Psycho, done by TV guy John L. Russell and looking every bit as 3-D and crystalline as Burks' work.)

I'd say that, for sheer "color eye candy" -- there is no more gorgeous Hitchcock film than "To Catch a Thief." Vertigo comes in a close second, with its lush views of San Francisco, the sea below it and the redwood groves near it. But To Catch a Thief has that fireworks display(outside the window of a perfectly lit and darkened hotel room); that charity ball(with Kelly's magnificent gold gown), the flower market(matched by the SF flower store in Vertigo) and ...the French Riviera.

But this: both during an HD TV version I watched the other night, and at a Cineplex one-night revival I saw with a surprisingly good crowd a few years ago, I noticed this:

The perfect prints of To Catch a Thief as we have them today show off a very distinctive color at night: GREEN. The dark night sky has a green tint. The roofs have a green tint. It is as if To Catch a Thief has a color scheme that - -in the nighttime scenes at least -- requires GREEN to be the color of night. Its beautiful -- but its weird.

And it reminded me to go to the source: the Hitchcock/Truffaut interview book of 1967 , in which Hitchcock says to Truffaut about To Catch a Thief:

"Hitchcock: The only interesting footnote I can add is that since I hate royal blue skies, I tried to get rid of the Technicolor blue for the night scenes. So we shot with a green filter to get the dark slate blue, the real color of night, but it still didn't come out as I wanted it."

I guess not. The main night color of To Catch a Thief IS green, but it is such a beautiful, otherworldly green that I think Hitchcock succeeded more than he thought in getting a "different look for night."

Note in passing: while I think that the Paramount films To Catch a Thief and Vertigo are the two most beautiful Hitchcock/Burks collaborations, North by Northwest visually, is a bit lesser. I say this even as I think that NXNW is a much more epic and exciting Hitchcock thriller than To Catch a Thief, and more entertaining than Vertigo.

I wonder if this can be chalked up to NXNW being made for MGM. Was it filmed in "MetroColor," I wonder. Many of the colors in NXNW are a bit subdued and flat. The only place where the photography IS beautiful -- and bigger than life , and atmospheric -- is for the final nighttime climax on Mount Rushmore -- the sky isn't green, but its a gorgeous blue for such a fantastic climactic confrontation.