The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) - film review

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...

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

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The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) is the first version of Hitchcock’s better known film of 1955 of the same name.  The title is somewhat ironic, because the hero does not know anything about a plot to kill a diplomatic, and receives an unclear clue about it through his wife, who takes it from a spy who dies in her arms. Against their choice, the man and his wife are caught up in intrigue that threatens their lives.  Their sin is to know something they should not.  In Hitchcock, casual knowing brings danger to the informed unfortunate (as in Shadow of a Doubt and I Confess).   Up to the end, the hero is guilty before the criminals, who play throughout the picture the role of a judge.  Lastly and happily, truth arrives at just the right moment.  Hitchcock was a Catholic and the idea of Original Sin was the inspiration for his thrilling creations.
Adam Gai (Israel) 

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