Summary
Bob and Jill Lawrence are on a skiing holiday in the Swiss alps when their friend, Louis
Bernard, is shot dead. Before he dies, Louis reveals that he is a British spy and
that he has a secret message, warning of an imminent high-profile assassination.
Before Bob and Jill can act, their daughter is kidnapped by enemy agents. They are
warned that unless they keep the information to themselves, their daughter will be killed.
Returning to London, Bob decides to take matters into his own hands. He soon manages
to trace his daughter’s abductors to their hideout, but he ends us a helpless prisoner...
Review
The Man Who Knew Too Much was the film which earned Alfred Hitchcock international
recognition and effectively assured his prolific film making career after a faltering
start in the early 1930s. His subsequent British films and his later Hollywood offerings
established him as the absolute master of the suspense thriller genre, and many of the
elements which made these films so great and so memorable are noticeable in The Man
Who Knew Too Much. This film was very much the prototype for what was to come
in future Hitchcock triumphs: the odd melange of comedy, drama and suspense; the disorienting
mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar; curious role reversals (the male hero appearing
ineffectual compared with the apparently conventional female lead); and, most visibly,
the extravagant set pieces, often set in famous landmark locations.
The subject of The Man Who Knew Too Much appealed so much to Hitchcock that he
remade the film in 1956, with James Stewart and Doris Day in the lead roles.
This American remake is certainly more polished than the 1934 original but lacks the frisson
of danger and dark, expressionist tones of that earlier film. In the 1934 film,
German actor Peter Lorre (the star of Fritz Lang’s M) makes his debut in an English-speaking
film role. In spite of the fact that he didn’t speak a word of English at the time
and had to learn his lines phonetically, Lorre is stunning as the film’s principal baddy
- a truly nasty piece of work, yet someone for whom you can’t help having some sympathy.
By contrast, the film’s good guys are pretty bland - Bob Lawrence (played somewhat
flatly by Leslie Banks) is pretty inept as both a father and a hero, and his accomplices
and nowhere near as interesting as his opponents. For this film, Hitchcock also
engaged another foreign actor, the Frenchman Pierre
Fresnay, who was to become one of the leading lights of French cinema in the late
1930s and 1940s.
The two scenes which stick in the memory are the suspenseful assassination attempt at
the Royal Albert Hall and the protracted street siege at the end of the film. The
former is typical Hitchcock, with the director employing all his guile as he contrives
to keep his audience on tenterhooks for as long as he can, the tension mounting to an
unbearable crescendo as a dastardly scheme reaches its climax. The second is less
characteristic but evokes certain themes which are noticeable in his later works - the
brutality and futility of aggression, the idea that two equally matched opposing forces
are inevitably drawn to a showdown of destructive attrition - mutual annihilation being
preferable to the shame of submission. Hitchcock reveals far more cynicism about
human nature here than we find in his later films, particularly his slicker Hollywood
ventures. It would be stretching it to say that he intended The Man Who Knew
Too Much to be an anti-war film, but political tensions at the time may have influenced
the director, and maybe the film’s bloody conclusion was partly meant to symbolise the
impending global conflict as Hitchcock saw it.
© James Travers 2004
Buy DVDs of World Cinema masterpieces...
|
