I sometimes get confused about movies and characters in them because often the same types come up again and again. When the source is archetypal or out of classic fairy tales, it is easy to see why it can get confusing. But when the character is a later invention taken from more recent manipulation of common prejudices and fantasies, the first question I always have is who was imitating whom?
Hitchcock made “To Catch a Thief” in the mid-1950’s. Released in 1955, the film is based on a novel published in 1952 by David Dodge set on the French Riviera in 1951. The story deals with contemporary events. If anyone reading this has read this book or anything else by David Dodge I would very much like any feedback from someone with direct impressions of it as a work of fiction.
I have not watched this movie in many years. I recall all that I really need to about the main character, John Robie, an ex-patriate American living on the Riviera, with a history and police record as a successful jewel thief complete with a nifty moniker, “Le Chat.” What better name for a cat burglar on the French Riviera?
Le Chat is played by Cary Grant. If you haven’t seen it, you can nevertheless imagine what kind of figure he cuts on the screen, how he moves, dresses, and the attitudes other characters have towards him. Arrested just before the Germans invaded and occupied France, he was released in an unofficial amnesty. So long as he commits no new crimes, he is allowed to enjoy his previously cached ill-gotten gains, playing boules with the locals and mixing with Riviera society.
In 1963 the first film in the Pink Panther franchise was released. This original screenplay by Maurice Richlin and Blake Edwards, directed by the latter, bears more than a few similarities to Hitchcock’s movie based on Dodge’s novel.
This go-round finds David Niven playing Sir Charles Litton, a suave, charming man of style, a true gentleman, who happens also secretly to be a jewel thief with a slick handle, “The Phantom.” His calling card at the scene of the crime is a single white glove monogramed with the letter “P” – get it?
Although Niven is the star, the movie’s supporting character, Inspector Clouseau played by Peter Sellers, managed to pull off the real heist here. Not only did this film launch one of the most successful comedy franchises ever for Sellers, but it also spawned a copycat film starring Steve Martin essentially doing an imitation of Sellers in 2006.
More interesting to me is how the original title became the calling card for later films. Although in the first movie, the Pink Panther refers to a diamond, in the minds of the public Pink Panther came to be synonymous with Sellers’ Clouseau character. Unless I am mistaken, the only film not to have Pink Panther in the title was “A Shot in the Dark.” Clouseau.
Which reminds me of another film franchise about detectives and crimes that has the same confusion with the title and character going on: “The Thin Man movies” starring William Powell. In the first film, “The Thin Man” refers to the corpse, not the detective character. But with later films someone obviously wanted the public to know what and whom they were going to see.
Oddly, I sometimes get confused between Dick Powell and William Powell, not as actors in front of the camera but behind it. Which one directed films such as “The Enemy Below”? Dick of course. But these Powells all get mixed up in my mind. By the way, Dick Powell was the first actor to play the detective Philip Marlowe on screen, if not the most famous.
William Powell’s Thin Man detective character Nick Charles may not quite be the same kind of suave debonair operator as played by Grant and Niven, but he’s close enough. His witty social alcoholic detective, along side the fabulous Nora played by Myrna Loy, falls into a similar enough character type to be associated with the other two thieves. The first Thin Man film came out in 1934. It was based on the novel of the same title the same year by Dashiell Hammett.
It is possible someone reading this has read Hammett but as time goes by, I am willing to wager that probability will diminish. Not to take anything away from the “hardboiled” detective genre, but some of this stuff is just not all that interesting in fiction tastes anymore.
I have read more than one Patricia Highsmith novel and can say my life would be no less without it. I do not feel that way about Hemingway, for instance. On the other hand, I enjoy movies based on Hammett and Highsmith more than movies based on Hemingway’s writing.
But wait, there’s more! None of these books and films is the first to feature a debonair gentleman burglar. “Grand Hotel” released in 1932 and directed by Edmund Goulding had in an ensemble cast with Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, among others, a character played by John Barrymore (Lionel’s younger brother, yes, these two were related), the Baron Felix von Geigern. He is the first gentleman burglar sneaking into hotel rooms in sartorial style to steal jewels and other valuables.
I will refrain from sharing too much of the plot points but will say for a film made in the Depression set in Germany after Weimar hyperinflation and on the verge of Hitler’s coming to absolute power, this is an interesting movie. Although this is represented as the swankiest and most expensive hotel in Berlin, most of the characters are dealing with serious money problems.
Our gentleman thief, however, is as dapper and charming as ever. Maybe more so. He charms almost everyone male and female and, if anything, is more like that guy in the PG-13 movie everyone’s really hoping makes it happen, including me, than the guy the R-rated movie we aren’t so sure about. Niven and Grant characters are more like the guy in the R-rated movie, to paraphrase a direction between characters in the movie “Swingers” (1996, directed by Doug Liman, original screenplay by Jon Favreau, the latter not to be confused with Jon Favreau of Pod Save America podcast).
From our distance of less than a century, only pesky OCD history sticklers are going to make too much of the difference between 1932 and 1963 for a sense of what’s sexy and still morally acceptable in entertainment. No one, however, will deny there is a big difference between then and now.
We’re not just considering subtle nuances here either. The world for women has changed a lot since these movies were made. During the decades spanned in their making, all kinds of serious social changes were going on, but how those changes show up in the films is not especially noticeable from movie to movie.
Thieves the audience roots for were certainly nothing new at the more or less contemporaneous time these stories came out. Historically, we can go back to the original Robin Hood. Nearer to the time of these stories, however, is the tradition of bank robbers and other outlaws in the United States especially, who grabbed the popular imagination as folk heroes.
There’s one more fictional character I get confused with the jewel thieves in this category. That’s Simon Templar, S.T., and so “The Saint.” Leslie Charteris created this character in fiction and somehow we got Roger Moore pre-Bond again as a charming twilight guy. In the books he’s pegged as a Robin Hood character stealing from other crooks and giving the money back to the victims.
I confess of all the characters and the books they are based on, I know least about The Saint, having only watched the TV show (I can hear the theme song now) and the movie with Val Kilmer reprising the role in an entirely updated version and story.
As a type, however, Simon Templar is cut from the same cloth and could have frequented the same tailor as the others. He’s got the cool and ironic nickname and his calling card is a little stick figure with a halo, posing like a dude who just dropped the microphone, boom. Second only to Mancini’s “Pink Panther” theme with Plas Johnson on sax, “The Saint” has a pretty cool theme song going for him, too.
On a side note, I have funny story about seeing Plas Johnson at Hollywood Park some years back with my barber, John Troya, who also plays the sax among other instruments. During the break when all the other fans at this less than stellar venue were approaching the stand to commend Plas on his performance, John went up to talk music. I noticed him staring at Johnson’s hair right off the bat. Plas was putting on his best chitchat cool and looking over the audience for anyone female of borderline attractiveness, or so it seemed to me.
When Johnson paused, John couldn’t refrain from mentioning to the man that his rug was looking a little ragged, and if he’d drop by the shop, he could fix it up for him gratis. I’ll let you imagine how Plas Johnson’s face changed. No one else was up there at that point but, anyway, you get the picture. John still chuckles about it but at the time he told me he would’ve been embarrassed to perform looking like that.
Of course, during the same time these movies were in the theaters, movies with Robin Hood were also churning out regularly. Even before, the silent Douglas Fairbanks 1922 film, there was a 1913 “Ivanhoe” movie I expect everyone to go watch. But these stories are hardly the first featuring a thief underdog striking back against the man.
“The Thief of Bagdad” is a story loosely plundered from the Arabian “A Thousand and One Nights.” These stories were first told reportedly hundreds of years before Robin Hood was even a twinkle in his author’s mind. The first film came out in 1924. Some day I may subject myself to it. The second came out in 1940 and has been one of my favorites since I first saw it on TV as a child.
One of the directors of the 1940 release was Michael Powell, no relation to the other Powells previously mentioned, and I am never confused about that.
Powell and Pressburger’s production company “The Archers” made some of the most wonderfully memorable films I’ve ever seen including “The Red Shoes,” “Black Narcissus,” “The Tales of Hoffman,” “A Matter of Life and Death” (starring David Niven), and “The Small Back Room.” I am not alone in my fandom. If there is any filmmaker who doesn’t pay tribute to these guys, I’ll be surprised.
The thing that makes The Archers’ movies so universally appealing is they go for fairy tale themes and characters which cut right to the heart and soul of humanity and cultural iconography. They don’t mess around with transient sex symbols. These guys were making nuns sexier than Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn ever were. Their heroes often are the bad men some may never quite become comfortable with, but I guarantee even the prude prim ladies in the audience are thinking they wouldn’t mind finding out what David Farrar’s characters have on their minds and what they smell like at the end of the day.
If I have to choose from all the male leads I’ve mentioned, I have to give Farrar’s Mr. Dean in “Black Narcissus” the sex appeal edge over all the others, and John Justin’s Ahmad in the 1940 “The Thief of Bagdad” the prize for most romantic:
[At the pool]
Princess: Who are you?
Ahmad: Your slave.
Princess: Where have you come from?
Ahmad: From the other side of time, to find you.
Princess: How long have you been searching?
Ahmad: Since time began.
Princess: Now that you’ve found me, how long will you stay?
Ahmad: To the end of time.
Ahmad: For me, there can be no more beauty in the world, than yours.
Princess: For me, there can be no more pleasure in the world, than to please you.
As a final note, preceding this exchange, there’s a song in the movie performed by Adelaide Hall, a renowned African-American singer who expatriated to Paris in 1936. I recall hearing that what prompted her and her husband to leave was having their house burned down by racist neighbors. I wonder if John Robie’s reason for leaving America was similar. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
I Dwell In Possibility 