‘To Catch a Thief’: Did Alfred Hitchcock’s movie inspire a brazen real-life crime at Cannes?
Movies by Alfred Hitchcock are many things, but most people wouldn’t try to argue that they are realistic. Glamorous, suspenseful, and full of outlandish twists and turns, they are larger than life in the best way possible and continue to captivate cinephiles of all persuasions. He occasionally drew upon real-life events as inspiration. His groundbreaking 1960 horror movie, Psycho, was based in part on the gruesome crimes of Ed Gein, while his 1956 thriller, The Wrong Man, was based on the true story of an innocent man accused of a terrible crime.
Movies that inspire copycat events are much more rare, especially (thank goodness) when it comes to ones about murder and theft. Oliver Stone’s 1994 satire Natural Born Killers remains notorious for inspiring a real-life crime spree, but it is the exception that proves the rule. It turns out that Hitchcock is also an exception, though the crime and the film in question were murder free.
In 2013, as journalists, stars, and fans were flocking to the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival for the premieres of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, and Ryan Coogler’s debut Fruitvale Station, a series of robberies cast a pall over the proceedings. First, $1million worth of Chopard jewels were stolen from a safe in the Novotel. Then, a $2.6m diamond necklace was snatched from the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc during a party.
However, the biggest heist of all came after the festival had ended. In July of that year, a lone thief entered the Carlton Intercontinental Hotel in broad daylight, picked up two bags filled with $136m in diamonds that were waiting to be put in a display cabinet, and escaped through an open window. As they were leaving, they tripped, scattering diamonds onto the Promenade de la Croisette. Somehow, they got away and have never been heard from again.
The location of the theft was key. The Carlton Hotel is most well-known for being the setting of Hitchcock’s 1955 thriller, To Catch a Thief, in which Cary Grant plays a notorious jewel thief who falls in love with an American heiress played by Grace Kelly. The connection was not lost on journalists at the time, who were eager to point to the parallels between the mysterious diamond heist and the plot of the film.
Since the thief has never been apprehended, it’s impossible to determine whether they were directly inspired by the film. However, if that person is who the police think he is, such a scenario would not be out of character. Milan Poparić, a Serbian criminal who escaped prison just days before the heist, has been singled out as the primary suspect. He is a known member of an international gang of jewel thieves that was given the name the Pink Panthers after they hid diamonds in a pot of face cream, just like the thieves in the 1975 Blake Edwards movie The Return of the Pink Panther. If Poparić was thinking about his legacy, he might have been trying to reinforce the cinematic through-line of his crimes.
Even without Hitchcock’s movie, the Carlton is steeped in showbiz history. It was where Kelly met Prince Rainier of Monaco, whom she would go on to marry, and it served as the setting for Elton John’s ‘I’m Still Standing’ music video in 1983. In the early ‘70s, it was also where a young filmmaker named George Lucas struck a deal with United Artists to make American Graffiti, a movie that would indirectly pave the way for Star Wars.
