Hitchcock’s British Films

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

While Hitchcock was struggling through Waltzes from Vienna, he had in his drawer the finished script for the film that would return him to form, The Man Who Knew Too Much. In five years, 1934–38, Hitchcock would direct the six films that established “the Hitchcock touch.” Contemporary reviews applauded Hitchcock’s new film: I am very happy about this film. It seems to me, because of its very recklessness, its frank refusal to indulge in subtleties, to be the most promising work that Hitchcock has produced since Blackmail. (C. A. Lejeune, Observer, December 8, 1934) Lately he has been badly served with stories. With The Man Who Knew Too Much, based on a celebrated criminal case of the early 1900s, he makes a striking come-back. (Daily Telegraph, December 10, 1934) After a prolonged spell of “Elstree blues” and a musical confection which was not in his line, Hitchcock leaps once again into the front rank of British directors. (Daily Express)1 The Man Who Knew Too Much 1934 Hitchcock’s British Films 136 Alistair Cooke heralded Hitchcock’s “familiar mastery of a slow ominous tempo, passages of breathless tantalizing cutting, and some psychological detail which advances him in the path previously trodden by Fritz Lang.”2 At least Cooke attends to the subtleties, something most reviewers in their enjoyment of the thrilling plot failed to do. As late as 1961, Peter John Dyer rued Hitchcock’s waste by “being inhibited by respectability ,” but for his “now legendary injections of ‘cinema.’” His audience was play-lovers and “esoteric cine-club types bent on seeking out all manner of functionless technical tricks and often non-existent subtleties.” But now, according to Dyer, “Hitchcock lost patience . . . threw compliance overboard and went in for making thrillers for the unsophisticated. The Man Who Knew Too Much . . . was outright melodrama , deficient in structure and flawed in its logic. But its very recklessness gave it an excitement hitherto unknown in the British cinema.”3 Hitchcock admits the film’s illogicality. He tells David Castell that he prefers the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much over his 1956 remake with James Stewart and Doris Day: “I think it was more spontaneous —it had less logic. Logic is dull: you always lose the bizarre and the spontaneous.”4 But with the American Bogdanovich, Hitchcock prefers the (American) remake: “The old one is fairly slipshod structurally .” Still, “Around that 1935 period, the audience would accept more, the films of the period were full of fantasy, and one didn’t have to worry too much about logic or truth. When I came to America, the first thing I had to learn was that the audiences were more questioning. I’ll put it another way. Less avant garde.”5 Truffaut’s detailed preference for the second version Hitchcock sidesteps discretely with “Let’s say that the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.”6 Certainly the first version is the wilder, the more fantastic. One need only compare the dentist scene with the taxidermist’s, or the fact that the heroine settles the issue with a shootout in the first version and a song in the second. Hitchcock’s “golden period” thrillers are fantasies of varying remoteness from reality. Their primary concern remains the tension between private interest and public duty. Particularly in the first of the series, the ostensible “recklessness” of Hitchcock’s narrative style subserves the values of discipline, self-control, and public service. 137 The Man Who Knew Too Much In the first The Man Who Knew Too Much a succession of Swiss travel folders threatens a reprise of Rich and Strange. Again an ordinary family is tossed into strange intrigue and threatened with separation. This time Hitchcock is more in control of his material; so is his family. His central characters here are the cause not the butt of the comedy. They are more competent and mature than their earlier counterparts. This married couple works in complete harmony and understanding, even though for most of the film they are apart. Bob and Jill Lawrence (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) are holidaying in the Alps with their young daughter, Betty (Nova Pilbeam). A new friend, Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay), is shot while dancing with Jill. He gives her a message for the British consulate. But the Lawrences are silenced when Betty is kidnapped. An anarchist cell is planning to assassinate a visiting dignitary, Ropa...