books, Media, Movies, Uncategorized

To Catch a Thief

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Spoiler Alert Possibility.  If you are anything like me and can easily seek out rabbit holes to throw yourself down, be aware that there may be some spoiler alerts coming up.

To Catch a Thief if one of my favorite movies.  How can you go wrong with a Hitchcock film starring Grace Kelly and Cary Grant?  It’s one of my go-to movies if I wake up during the night and my brain won’t let go (I own it via my cable company).  It’s also what I play in my head if I need to pass some serious time (think MRI kinds of things); the last MRI of my ankle took 45 minutes and I got almost all the way through to the final scene.

Considering how many times I seen the opening credits, I’m not sure why I just realized a few weeks ago that the movie is based on a novel of the same name by David Dodge, who wrote quite a few books back in the fifties and sixties and was quite a success, especially after Thief got picked up by Hitchcock and turned into an Academy-award winning film.  Well, you know me – I had to find the book.  I read online that they made quite a few changes to the book while filming and that just ignited my desire to find it.   Inter-Library Loan to the rescue!

This is backwards for me.  Normally if there is a movie made from a book, I try to get the book read before I see the movie.  (Sometimes this backfires – having read The Martian before the movie was out, I realized that I NEVER want to see the movie.  What I have in my head is all that I want.)  Occasionally though I see a movie and eventually read the book.  This doesn’t happen too often although a couple of times it’s caused me heartache.  Both The Natural and Suspicion were movies that I really liked and had seen multiple times.  Then I read the books and now can never see those movies again.  It’s one thing to make changes to a book, but oh my goodness.  Neither of those movies even began to keep true to the heart of the story or the characters.  And this is really sad because Suspicion is another Hitchcock/Grant pairing.  Just can’t do it.

Anyway, back to Thief.  Having prepared myself for a book quite unlike the movie, I was pleasantly surprised.  The main story lines match up closely, although the book has way more moving characters than the movie.  The bad guy is the same, although the motivation of that character is different between the book and the film.  The insurance guy isn’t nearly as interesting a character in the book as John Williams played.  The final denouement had a similar twist but I preferred the movie version – especially since it involves a drop-dead gorgeous gold gown (designed by Edith Head).  There were also a few places where dialog from the book was dropped into the movie.  The main differences that I could see were some of the shifting morality/ethics in the book that were not present in the movie.  In the movie, even the thief was a good guy; in the book things were much more loosey goosey.  In fact, the strictly upright best friend completely flip flops in the end and decides to protect the bad guy – nobody goes to jail in the book.

I knew going into this that the book probably wasn’t going to mar my enjoyment of the movie, but it was nice that the two actually fit together better than I expected.  I’ve decided that I prefer the movie – the plot line is a little cleaner and, of course, the cinematography is stunning.  Guess I’m safe to keep playing it in my head when I need to!

Do you any favorite movies?  Are any of them adapted from books?

39 thoughts on “To Catch a Thief”

  1. Martian is a favorite as is the book. The changes are mostly to fit in the time. The movie is brilliantly cast. The one huge error of science, which I spotted in the book, bothers me more in the movie, but without that error you have no plot. The author knew it but could not find another way.
    The makers of the movie The Natural should be arrested for criminal damage. Literature turned into pulp trash
    Clyde

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  2. One of my favorite movies was the Disney version of The Parent Trap, with Hayley Mills playing the twins. It was based (according to Wiki) on a German novel: “In 1962, Cyrus Brooks translated Das doppelte Lottchen into English as Lottie and Lisa (later as Lisa and Lottie),[1] an edition still published in the United States and Canada.”

    Who knew? Don’t know if I have time to hunt up the book, but you never know.

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  3. I have had 15 MRI’s in four different places. AND I have claustrophobia. Plus lying on my back on a hard surface scores about 8-9 for pain. For three, when they put my head in the cradle, I was fully sedated. For the others I take a pill and walk the paths of the farm where I grew up. The idea for my second novel came to me during an MRI.

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    2. My first MRI, for a sore shoulder, was terribly unpleasent. I hummed in tune with the sounds of the machine to get through.

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    1. Ditto. I always wonder what authors think when their books become movies. But I read something somewhere that William Goldman was on set throughout the filming of Princess Bride. I assume that means that he wasn’t outraged at all.

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  5. I agree with Clyde about “The Martian”. I saw the movie first. When reading the book a couple years later I found that the movie very closely follows the book. I enjoyed both of them very much.

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  6. I can’t think of an instance where I like a book and think, “Oh, I hope someone makes that into a movie.” In fact, I see relatively few movies and the sort of books I typically read are not the sort that gets made into movies. Coincidentally, I recently finished reading a biography of the Mitford sisters and I see that a series, “Outrageous”, is being produced based on a different author’s biography of the sisters. That may be interesting.

    While I am often aware that a book preceded a movie I have liked I don’t generally seek out that book. I know that “Oh Brother Where Are You” is based loosely—very loosely—on the Odyssey, but having enjoyed the movie I wasn’t tempted to revisit the epic.

    I’ve commented here before about “Sweetland”, based on Will Weaver’s short story A Gravestone Made of Wheat. Having liked the story, I had occasion to see the movie and in my opinion it was a travesty, the director having added implausible details and altered the basic story line so that the ending made no sense.

    I think I’ve seen several productions of Jane Eyre but I’ve never actually read the original. Thinking about this topic inspires me to pick up and read Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm. I expect that would be entertaining.

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  7. Little Big Man was interesting to watch to watch Hoffman but in every way not the book. The the tone of the book could not be visual I don’t think.

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  8. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Ordinary People. I loved the book, but then Robert Redford produced and directed it (I thinnk he directed it) and the characters and the story just lept off the screen. I was in grad school when it came out, which was when I started to cope with my own personal issues and started therapy. I saw it many times and still haul out the DVD from time to time.

    It was so well cast, and Timothy Hutton never recovered from such a skilled first role.

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    2. Mary Tyler Moore was such an unusual casting choice at that time. I remember hearing an interview with Robert Redford once … that he was walking along the beach and MTM was sitting on the beach staring out at the water and something inside him just knew in that very moment that she was the one. Great intuition.

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  9. In general, I think I have better luck if the film is what leads me to a book rather than the other way around. A well made film can spark my interest in a reading the work it was based on, and I can enjoy both even if they differ on details. If I’ve read a book and enjoyed it, I often resist seeing the film version, most often because I’m fearful that characters in the film won’t match my idea of who the characters in the story are, how they look, and how they behave. I’m not a huge Mary Tyler Moore fan, and I resisted seeing Ordinary People because of it. But I have to agree with Jacque, she was perfect for her role in that film. One film that a lot of people loved and which I didn’t like at all is Out of Africa. I was very familiar with Karen Blixen’s book, and I thought both Meryl Streep and Robert Redford were horrible choices for the main characters.

    I read Annie Proulx’ short story Brokeback Mountain after first seeing the film, and I thought both were very well done. The same is true of A River Runs Through It. Robert Redford worked for years to convince Norman Maclean, the author of the book, to allow him to film it. To my mind he did a fine job of capturing the spirit of the book even if it deviated from the original story. Again, I loved both the film and the novella.

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    2. I thought Brokeback Mountain (the movie) was a big nothingburger. The characters being gay, or tentatively gay, or confused or whatever was not enough to make them interesting or for that matter tragic.

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  11. My housemate and I watched the British series of “Magpie Murders” before reading the book, and we agree that the series is better–the book is split in half, with the first half being the Atticus Pund novel and the second half the “real life” mystery of who killed the author of the Pund novel. Conversely, the screenplay skillfully interweaves the two worlds, and even lets Susan interact with Atticus. But then, Anthony Horowitz is a very experienced writer of TV mysteries, including “Poirot,” “Midsomer Murders,” and “Foyle’s War”. We do not entirely approve of the ending, which we consider to be reaching a bit too far (and which I will not spoil), but the journey to get there is very engaging. I recommend both the book and the series, which TPT is currently rerunning in anticipation of the adaptation of the second novel, “Moonflower Murders.”

    Speaking of “Poirot,” the 1980s saw several good to excellent adaptations of classic British mysteries, chiefly Joan Hickson’s incomparable Miss Marple. The 21st century “Marple” series is heavily rewritten and quite wretched.

    The book “The Lord of the Rings” is so much superior to the Peter Jackson films that I consider them “inspired by” only. That he rewrote some characters’ motivations and added not only new clunky dialogue but “humorous” scenes is the most appalling hubris! Let us please pretend that the Hobbit movies never happened…

    I’m afraid I can never think of an answer when people ask me what my favorite movie is. I can’t usually think of a favorite book, either, since I have at least a dozen, each for a different mood (or, as my housemate says, the flavor I want in my brain at the moment).

    –Crow Girl

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    1. Funny, we have just been rewatching Magpie Murders. As usual, we can’t remember the resolution and we are down to the last episode tonight. We have bets on whodunit. (I have not read the book).

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    2. All of the Tolkien books are so intricate that making a movie has to be impossible. I have always wondered why that material is not presented as a limited series which would allow so much more than a 2-3 hour movie.

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      1. The Jackson LOTR was good for me – no other versions have done a thing for me though. I haven’t seen the last few Hobbit movies, beginning with the Smaug movie. I probably should see it however, since I’m very interested in how you make a full length movie from 20-odd pages.

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  12. I remember seeing the movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie many decades ago. It made an impression. Maggie Smith and Pamela Franklin brought the characters to life.

    Reading the book was a surprise, because there was a lot less drama in the book. It seemed a bit thin in comparison. The book was a character study, but it wouldn’t have made much of a movie without that extra dollop of drama added by the screenwriter.

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