The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much
Directed by	Alfred Hitchcock
Produced by	Michael Balcon (uncredited)
Written by	Charles Bennett D. B. Wyndham-Lewis Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson (scenario)
Starring	Leslie Banks Edna Best Peter Lorre Nova Pilbeam Frank Vosper
Music by	Arthur Benjamin
Distributed by	Gaumont British Distributors Ltd.
Release date(s)	December 1934 UK release March 22, 1935 U.S. release
Running time	75 min
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	£40,000 (estimated)

The Man Who Knew Too Much is a 1934 suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Peter Lorre, and released by Gaumont British. It was one of the most successful and critically acclaimed films of Hitchcock's British period.

Hitchcock remade the film with James Stewart in 1956 for Paramount Pictures; it's the only film he ever remade. The two films are, however, very different in tone, in setting, and in many plot details.

Synopsis

The plot concerns Bob and Jill Lawrence (Leslie Banks and Edna Best), a British couple on vacation in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and their daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam). The couple befriend a foreigner, Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay), who is staying in their hotel. One evening, as Jill dances with Louis, she witnesses his assassination as a French spy. Before dying, the spy passes on to them some vital information to be delivered to the British consul.

In order to ensure their silence, the assassins, led by a charming and nefarious Abbott (Peter Lorre), kidnap their daughter. Unable to secure much meaningful help from the police, the couple return to England and, after following a series of leads, discover the group intends to assassinate a European ambassador during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Jill attends the concert and distracts the gunman with a scream. The assassins are killed by the police, Betty's sharpshooting mother dispatching the assassin who formerly beat her in a sharpshooting contest. A single assassin commits suicide rather than be captured. Betty is returned to her parents.

Production

Peter Lorre was unable to speak English at the time of filming (a Jew, he had only recently fled from Nazi Germany) and learned his lines phonetically.^[1]

The shoot-out at the end of the film was based on the Sidney Street Siege, a real-life incident which took place in London's East End (where Hitchcock grew up) on 3 January 1911.^[2][3][4]. The shoot-out was not included in Hitchcock's 1956 remake.

Hitchcock hired Australian composer Arthur Benjamin to write a piece of music especially for the climactic scene at Royal Albert Hall. The music, known as the Storm Clouds cantata, is used in both the 1934 and 1956 versions.

The Man Who Knew Too Much is actually the first of two films based on the same material and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Perhaps the better known of the two is the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring James Stewart and Doris Day.

There are several differences between the two productions. The 1956 version is in color, boasts a much longer running time, as well as the star power of Stewart and Day, and features an Oscar-winning song entitled “Que Sera, Sera.”

There is also a reversal in commonly expected gender roles in the leading characters of Bob and Jill. From the very start, Jill takes the more active hero role, by virtue of the fact that she’s participating quite ably in a sharp shooting competition. In fact, she’s a world-renowned marksman, a skill that will prove to be extremely useful later in the picture. Bob, on the other hand, is left to banter with his daughter and fiddle around with a knitted sweater in the works.

Bob and Jill’s marriage is also well beyond the honeymoon stage, and they are not an idealized couple like Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man (1934). Most of Jill’s scenes are with other men, while Bob spends the majority of the film separated from her - on the hunt for his kid or in the custody of the villains. Also noticeably different from the 1956 version is the lack of an aggressive sense of urgency to find the kidnapped girl. Occasionally, it’s possible for the viewer to forget they are even in pursuit of Betty. In fact, it could be argued that the daughter is the MacGuffin, which was Hitchcock’s handy, ambivalent, and interchangeable object that motivates the plot, but which proves to be inconsequential to the viewer’s enjoyment of the movie. The emphasis is more on a personal, almost affable cat-and-mouse match—developed more in future Hitchcock films such as Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), and North by Northwest (1959)—that could not have been possible without the casting of Peter Lorre as Abbott, the lead criminal conspirator.^[5]

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appears 26 minutes into the film. He can be seen crossing the street in a black trench coat just before they enter the dentist's office.^{[citation needed]}

Production crew

• Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
• Written by Charles Bennett and D. B. Wyndham-Lewis
• Associate Producer: Ivor Montagu
• Photography: Curt Courant
• Editor: H St. C.J. Stewart
• Music: Arthur Benjamin

Cast

• Leslie Banks as Lawrence
• Edna Best as Jill
• Peter Lorre as Abbott
• Frank Vosper as Ramon
• Hugh Wakefield as Clive
• Nova Pilbeam as Betty Lawrence
• Pierre Fresnay as Louis
• Cicely Oates as Nurse Agnes
• B.A. Clarke Smith as Binstead
• George Curzon as Gibson

References

Further reading

• Youngkin, Stephen D. (2005). The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-813-12360-7.  -- Contains interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and a discussion on the making of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).

External links

• The Man Who Knew Too Much available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• The Man Who Knew Too Much at the Internet Movie Database
• The Man Who Knew Too Much at Allmovie
• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) at the AFI/Turner Classic Movies database
• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) Eyegate Gallery