To Catch a Thief / Artists and Models

Cinema has endured for decades in the face of competing visual storytelling mediums. In connection with our event The New Audience: Moviegoing in a Connected World, discover how studios and filmmakers – long before tablets, smartphones and the Internet – responded as audiences began trading regular visits to the movies for the ease and affordability of the first small screen: television. In response, numerous widescreen cinematic formats were rolled out around the world and capitalized on the breathtaking width of the projected image, not to mention the heightened fidelity of stereophonic sound, to achieve effects far beyond the reach of TV sets. This Is Widescreen offers a colorful assortment of films that demonstrate how filmmakers found new means of engaging the flexibility of the cinema and the key larger-than-life film formats employed over a 15-year period in Hollywood – from the launch of Cinerama in 1952 and the subsequent widescreen boom that included CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO and others – plus highlights from the first wave of 'Scope filmmaking from around the globe.

To Catch a Thief

60th Anniversary
Friday, May 15 | 7:30 P.M.

Alfred Hitchcock teamed the impossibly glamorous Cary Grant and Grace Kelly (in her final film for the director) in a romantic caper set against the scenic backdrop of the French Riviera. Grant plays John Robie, a reformed master thief who becomes the prime suspect when a series of copycat crimes befalls wealthy tourists, and the next likely victim is gorgeous Frances Stevens (Kelly), who offers Robie a prize more tempting than any jewel. From Robert Burks’s Oscar-winning VistaVision cinematography to John Michael Hayes’s innuendo-laden dialogue, as a picnicking Kelly offers Grant “a leg or a breast,” To Catch a Thief is one of the Master of Suspense’s most elegant light entertainments.

1955, 106 minutes, color, DCP | Directed by Alfred Hitchcock; written by John Michael Hayes, based on the novel by David Dodge; with Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Jessie Royce Landis, John Williams, Charles Vanel, Brigitte Auber, Jean Martinelli, Georgette Anys, Roland Lesaffre.

Artists and Models

60th Anniversary

Friday, May 15 | 9:30 P.M.

Animator-turned-director Frank Tashlin began his memorable collaboration with Jerry Lewis in this rollicking Martin and Lewis vehicle that looked at the world of comic books and their fans decades before that medium would dominate Hollywood filmmaking. Dean Martin plays Rick Todd, a painter who wants to be a serious artist but ends up illustrating the comic book The Bat Lady, and Lewis plays Eugene Fullstack, his infantile, comics-obsessed roommate. While Rick falls for fellow comics artist Abigail (Dorothy Malone), Eugene becomes obsessed with Bat Lady model Bessie (Shirley MacLaine, in the first of seven films she would make with Martin) but doesn’t recognize her out of costume. Drawing upon his own background in cartoons, Tashlin filled his colorful VistaVision frames with outlandish and colorful comedic imagery while proving an inspiration to Lewis’s own filmmaking career.

1955, 108 minutes, color, DCP | Directed by Frank Tashlin; screenplay by Tashlin, Hal Kanter, Herbert Baker, adaptation by Don McGuire, based on the play Rockabye Baby by Michael Davidson, Norman Lessing; with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Shirley MacLaine, Dorothy Malone, Eddie Mayehoff, Eva Gabor, Anita Ekberg.