Cary Grant Kisses Grace Kelly – Eww! [To Catch a Thief, Media Notes 48]

I watched this film, say, two months ago, and recoiled just a bit the first time Cary Grant kissed Grace Kelly, or rather she kissed him. Why? At the time – the film is from 1955 – Grant was in his early 50s while Kelly was in her mid-20s, so it was a May-December romance. And that is and has been a standard element in movie plots since, well, forever, and it happens often enough in real life as well. Thus Jessa Crispin notes in a recent article, “Pathologizing Desire”, in Boston Review:

The older man coupled with the younger woman is Hollywood tradition, from a young Audrey Hepburn pursued by Cary Grant (Charade), Fred Astaire (Funny Face), or Humphrey Bogart (Sabrina) (all of the men looking overripe and easily bruised at the time of filming), to Catherine Zeta-Jones writhing in front of Sean Connery in Entrapment, or marrying her real life partner Michael Douglas, twenty-five years her elder. This age gap coupling is also a reality; around 30 percent of American heterosexual marriages consist of men at least four years older than their partners.

I figure that that’s what bothered me. But why? It’s never bothered me before, not that I can remember.

The film, as you may recall, is by Hitchcock, and there is one scene that indicated that Hitchcock may himself have had doubts about their relationships. This is a bit later in the film, in the evening and in her hotel room, at her invitation. They talk in the dim evening light and then they kiss, passionately and at some length. While they are flirting we see fireworks through a window. The camera cuts back and forth between their kissing and the fireworks. The music reaches a crescendo.  Hitchcock is serving up a romantic cliché: kiss = fireworks. He can’t possibly be serious. Why the parody?

I don’t quite know.

Let’s think a bit more about the film. Grant is a retired jewel thief living on the French Riviera. There’s a string of robberies in the area employing his methods, so naturally, the authorities suspect him. He seeks help from his old buddies from the French Resistance, who operate a restaurant. The teenage daughter of one ferries him to safety. She’s got a crush on him.

This, that, and the other – including that first kiss, which Kelly plants on him – transpires, and the next day Grant and Kelly go to the beach. Teenage daughter is there and swims out to a float. Grant follows and she flirts. Then Kelly joins them. Banter ensues and Kelly sees daughter’s crush. It’s then, I suspect, that she really decides to pursue Grant, which she does. Moreover, knowing that he was once a thief, she thinks that he’s the  current thief and later offers to be his accomplice.

More stuff happens, including the death of one of Grant’s wartime buddies, the one who is father to the flirtatious teenager. He too had been a thief back in the day and the police conclude that he was the thief. But he couldn’t have been because he had a wooden leg, which made it impossible to climb over rooftops. Finally, the thief is caught. Who is it? Flirtatious teenage daughter.

So, daughter follows in daddy’s footsteps as a thief. Daughter has a crush on daddy’s old thief compatriot (Grant). That feels a bit incestuous. And that Kelly becomes interested in Grant only after seeing daughter’s interest, that feels rather Girardian (mimetic desire). On the whole, it comes out as some kind of symbolic incest.

I think. Perhaps that’s what bothered me. Who knows.