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The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 film)
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The Man Who Knew Too Much is a 1934 suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock 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 in 1956 for Paramount Pictures, the only film that he ever remade. The two films are however very different in tone, in setting, and in many plot details.
Synopsis
The plot concerns a British couple on vacation in St Moritz, Switzerland, Bob and Jill Lawrence, (Leslie Banks) and (Edna Best), and their daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), and befriend a foreigner, Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay), staying in their hotel.
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Encyclopedia
The Man Who Knew Too Much is a 1934 suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock 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 in 1956 for Paramount Pictures, the only film that he ever remade. The two films are however very different in tone, in setting, and in many plot details.
Synopsis
The plot concerns a British couple on vacation in St Moritz, Switzerland, Bob and Jill Lawrence, (Leslie Banks) and (Edna Best), and their daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), and befriend a foreigner, Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay), staying in their hotel. One evening as Jill dances with Louis, she witness 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), kidnaps their daughter. Unable to secure much meaningful help from the police, the couple returns to England and after following a series of leads, they discover that 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 captured by the police, and 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.
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. . 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 that Alfred Hitchcock directed. 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, the star power of Stewart and Day, and an Oscar®-winning song called “Que Sera, Sera.” While the 1956 version is required viewing for any Hitchcock fan, the original British production should not be overlooked either. While it may not have the remake’s bigger budget and exotic Moroccan locales caught on Technicolor VistaVision, the 1934 version is lean, fast-paced and radically different in tone and narrative structure.
First, there is a reversal in commonly expected gender roles in the leading characters of Bob and Jill. From the very start, we notice that it’s Jill who is taking 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 to 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.
Alfred Hitchcock's Cameo appears 31 minutes into the film, crossing the street in a heavy dark black jacket.
Production crew
Cast
Further reading
- -- Contains interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and a discussion on the making of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).
External links
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