643 The Man Who Knew Too Much

[zedz]

Well, I never thought I'd see this film looking so splendid! And a very nice set of extras. The Lindstrom and Truffaut interviews are standard issue (but welcome): Hitchcock really had his anecdotes well-oiled by this stage. The commentary is very comprehensive; the restoration demonstration, as noted above, exemplary; and I'm always amazed at how great Guillermo del Toro is talking about other people's films.

[MichaelB]

I'm always amazed at how great Guillermo del Toro is talking about other people's films.

He's no slouch at writing either: his is one of the standout contributions to the BFI's new Gothic anthology.

[quequeg]

Philip Kemp, in his commentary states:

"if you're waiting for the director's cameo appearance, you may be disappointed. There is a point... (at 34 minutes) where some people think they have spotted Hitch. Personally, I doubt if its him... just a portly extra. If its Hitch, its certainly the briefest and most unobtrusive of all of his cameos."

I think he is wrong about this as the cameo is quite consistent with his appearances in other films of this era. He usually wore something or did something that draws attention. In this case, he wears a shiny black coat which is very noticeable. I don't think that an extra would have been allowed to wear such a coat. Also, Hitchcock often made his appearance at a crucial point in the film. Here he appears just before the characters arrive at the Tabernacle of the Sun. Finally, its not the briefest or most unobtrusive of his cameos. His appearance in Secret Agent was much more difficult to see (He is seated on a ferry in complete shadow. He moves forward, into the light, very briefly and then retreats back into the shadows) and the cameo in Number 17 is equally brief (He is a passenger on the bus as it chases the train--his face pops-up briefly behind a hysterical woman).
I don't know why Mr. Kemp thinks that this is not Hitchcock as he appears in virtually every film (although I can not find his appearance in Jamaica Inn) and he can not be spotted at any other point in this film.

[Jonathan S]

I don't have the Criterion edition, but from the positive reviews of the soundtrack I assume they must have used either a different element than Network (UK Blu-ray) or done some further major clean-up. The Network release is a huge improvement visually on their previous DVD release (chiefly tramline removal) but their Blu-ray soundtrack is actually worse in respect of loud rhythmic buzzing that on occasion continues for at least a whole reel, e.g. the dentist sequence (no, it's not the drill!) This interference is not heard on Network's DVD.

Incidentally, it's often forgotten how difficult it used to be to see this film, at least in the UK. I think in the US it may have been treated as PD (I recall home movie catalogs openly offering 16mm & 8mm prints in the 1970s). But in the UK, the BBC had to seek Hitchcock's personal permission in 1969 for what may have been its sole TV screening until it finally re-surfaced on Channel 4 in a heavily scratched print around 2000, long after the remake had returned to circulation:

One of Hitchcock's favourite films, it was unavailable for many years because the copyright was acquired for the 1955 remake. The BBC is grateful to Mr Hitchcock for allowing it to be shown this season.

[MichaelB]

When I screened it in the 1990s, I had to borrow a 16mm print from a collector, and apply for permission from Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell. Which was granted by fax almost at the last minute.

[Mr Sausage]

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[dustybooks]

Though I think Blackmail is truly great and that The Lodger, Rich and Strange and Murder! all are key steps in Hitchcock's evolution, I don't think it's controversial to say that this is where he really hits his stride. There's much to be said for the great setpieces -- I'm especially partial to the Tabernacle chair fight -- but the real triumph here is casting. No previous Hitchcock film had been populated with so many memorable, strange faces in every significant role. As with all of the Gaumont thrillers, the atmosphere is electric and intoxicating, with a weird feeling of dread permeating all the urgency; I think most of Hitchcock's masterpieces were made in Hollywood, but there's something to be said for the economy and breathless excitement of these films.

I've brought this up before here but to me the most fascinating element of the original Man Who Knew Too Much -- and a striking contrast to the remake -- is its portrayal of marriage. It's not the primary or even secondary subject of the film by any stretch, as it arguably is in the 1956 film, but the nonchalance with which it's presented is a good example of what to me is Hitchcock's forte, the examination of mundane and everyday things through the lens of a thriller. Leslie Banks and Edna Best feel like a real couple to me, with a history and a comfort level that's really palpable in their interactions. That makes the kidnapping of Nova Pilbeam more devastating in a way but I suppose it doesn't have a direct impact on the way the story turns out. Conversely, Best's role is considerably smaller than Doris Day's. I think both films deserve better than to just have all discussion about them turn into comparisons, of course.

[Mr Sausage]

I was beginning to worry at the climax that the movie really would make nothing of its sharpshooter heroine. But then her rival made his way onto the roof, and I saw everything would have its proper resolution.

I voted for the movie because it was the only one I hadn't seen. My reaction to this is the same as to Sabotage and The Secret Agent, for instance: fine thrillers with some good bits, but not especially memorable or filled with discussion material. I did really enjoy most of the set-pieces here--the concert assassination was especially brilliant with how expertly it cut around Edna Best's POV and sped up in time to the music. Very well done. The chair fight in the church...well, I can only hope it was intended as comically as it came across (a real possibility). The climax was nice, but it could be used as an emblematic instance of plot and character being lost amidst endless action, as both main characters (and indeed all the villains) are lost for most of it, either put out of the way or represented only by disconnected shots. It's all very well done, but Hitchcock would become much better at integrating his climactic set-pieces with the characters and plot.

I think there's perhaps much to be made of the the implied sexual threat of the rival sharpshooter (all teeth and brilliantine), how frustrated he is after shooting the clay pigeon only for Edna Best to walk off with another man, making veiled sexual jokes all the way. Her husband is of course the model of the ironic and witty but sexually passive and ultimately permissive British male. I don't doubt that this film is partly about returning a wife who is somewhat free in her friendships to a secure family unit by attempting to split that unit violently, forcing an equally violent attempt to reunify it; and there is at least something to be made of the husband being shot by the marksman, leaving the wife to save the daughter, kill her rival, and make the shot her child had earlier caused to miss. Indeed, the motif unifying the film is the wife's two shots: the first, a failure at an individualist sport that she blames on her child (jokingly but pointedly); the second, a success motivated entirely by the safety of that child. There's a whole undergrad paper to be written on this.

[Roscoe]

Basically, the original it is a fairly amusing little movie with the occasional little flourish of imagination. Don't get me wrong. There are things to recommend both films. I'm not talking about the obvious differences in budget and technical expertise. I find it interesting that the original was a fairly low-budget affair that manages to pull off some surprisingly good effects, while the remake is a well-produced big studio effort that has some astonishingly cheap-looking rear-projection scenes.

The good points about the original: it has the virtue of speed. The plot just flies along. There is an interesting little performance from Peter Lorre, who manages to make a lot out of a rather sketchily written part. I like the way that the Lawrences as husband and wife actually seem to like each other a good deal, rather in the mode of Nick and Nora Charles. I like the little flourishes that Hitchcock tosses in along the way: Lorre's musical watch, and selected little bits of expressionist-style cinematography.

The problems: The characters never really come to life at all in any meaningful way. They're very two-dimensional, pawns to be moved about in getting the story from place to place. While I do like the superficial give and take between Leslie Banks and Edna Best, it never really goes much deeper than that. Mrs. Lawrence really takes a back seat. The one surprise is Mrs. Lawrence's skill with a shotgun, which is shown at the beginning of the film and is then never mentioned again until the final moments of the film (more is made of Lorre's musical watch than of her skills as a markswoman.). The big siege at the end is almost completely tension free, until Mr. Lawrence and his daughter attempt their escape.

That's not to say that the remake is any kind of masterpiece, or anything. It does take a bit too long to get moving, and there's some rather labored comedy about the McKennas being fish out of water abroad. That scene in the restaurant with Stewart trying to get comfortable just never ends. And there's an unwieldiness to the story too. I feel like there's a lot of energy expended in dealing with Ambrose Chappell and Ambrose Chapel and then getting Jo to Albert Hall while leaving Dr. McKenna at the Chapel, etc. And the remake doesn't quite solve the story's biggest problem: that the story's climax is the sequence at the Albert Hall, and what comes after it can only be felt to be anticlimactic.

On the other hand, the remake features a more fully detailed script. The characters are more fully fleshed out: we learn who they bloody well are. In the original we never really learn much of anything about the Lawrences: they seem to be a happily married upper middle class couple. There is no idea given of the Lawrences' lives before the events of the film. We never even learn what, if anything, Mr. Lawrence does for a living.

In the remake, we get a wealth of information about the McKennas, their lives and careers and, equally importantly, ex-careers. And it isn't by any means a prettier picture: the McKenna marriage has some very deep strains that are nowhere in evidence in the Lawrence marriage. I can't forget that hideous scene where Dr. McKenna makes his wife take sleeping pills in exchange for news of their child. But if that scene goes too far, and I think it can be argued that it does, at least it is beautifully done. Doris Day's work in that horrible scene is immensely effective, far more emotionally devastating than anything that Edna Best is expected to do in the original.

[Tommaso]

The chair fight in the church...well, I can only hope it was intended as comically as it came across (a real possibility).

I would say that at least some parts of the film are staged with some sort of comic intent, that scene included. But it already starts early on with the first killing and the victim's almost nonchalant reaction to it ("Oh, look at this!", or something to that effect). Later on it's Lawrence's sidekick who is always subjected to absurd situations, first at the 'dentist' where he apparently gets a tooth pulled out, later on he's 'hypnotised' in the church, and finally he doesn't even manage to convince the police that the bad guys are in the house (the police rather believe Lorre instead). If this had been an American film, I would have imagined someone like Edward Everett Horton to play that role.

Otherwise I agree with basically everything that has been said in this thread so far. Not too very well known actors, mostly, but great choices all around (where did he get that beanstalk named Cicely Oates from, who plays the evil church priestess?). The final shoot-out scene is a bit too long and feels strangely static (probably some dramatic music would have enhanced it, even though I'm normally not much a fan of such an obvious device to create suspense where there isn't much in the first place). Apart from this, it's indeed a quite fine little thriller which I enjoyed especially for what seems to me a certain 'Germanic' influence, be that in Peter Lorre's participation or the mountainside scenes (okay, both are Swiss), but perhaps most of all in the sets/art direction by Alfred Junge, a man who is probably now best known for his work on Dupont's "Varieté". The nice shady lighting and some of the nighttime street scenes reminded me a bit of Weimar film-making.

[Drucker]

I had a similar reaction upon re-watching Man Who Knew Too Much as the first time I watched it, which seems to be in line with a bunch of the other posts here. As Tommasso said, the climax of the movie is a bit static, and I think it's actually applicable to a great deal of the movie. The sense of tension that usually comes so naturally with Hitchcock's plots is largely absent. I think the dentist scene is a good example: we enter a set, and we get a sense something's "off", but it is actually quite quickly resolved. At a brisk 75 minutes, the film may be a bit too short. The film never takes a moment to catch its breath, but I felt there are so many twists and turns, it's hard to keep track of them all.

[Roscoe]

Alfred Junge also worked on Powell Pressburger's BLACK NARCISSUS, I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! and LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, and A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.

[Sloper]

I’m definitely with dustybooks on this one – this is a great film, and personally I much prefer it to the remake. It’s a bit rough around the edges, there are some awkward moments, and I think all the criticisms levelled at it in this thread are valid to some extent, but it’s so much more fun than the 1956 version, and so much more lively and exciting in cinematic terms. You can really feel Hitchcock’s love for directors like Murnau and especially Lang. He’s picked up Lang’s way (particularly evident in Spione, M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) of integrating wry, absurdist humour into action sequences, as in the aforementioned chair-fight, the dentist scene (which I found genuinely suspenseful, but then absurdly funny when Banks grabs the dentist by the throat and switches places with him), and the climax, where we see the plainclothes cops enjoying a cup of tea while waiting for the rifles to arrive. Maybe my favourite bit was when, in the aftermath of the fight in the church, Peter Lorre pushes Banks in the face, then slinks off and says ‘Sorry’, sheepishly. Or maybe it was the bit Sausage alluded to above, in the Albert Hall sequence, when Edna Best is watching the orchestra, and the image blurs and fades to evoke her sense of distress, and then seamlessly transitions to the famous extreme close-up of the assassin’s gun turning towards the camera. For all the remake’s cold professionalism, it just doesn’t have the freewheeling wit of moments like this. (Loved the cut from the reference to brilliantine to the close-up of Ramon’s glossy hair as well.)

Interesting points from Mr Sausage and Roscoe about the film’s treatment of marriage. The remake seems to reflect Hitchcock’s frequent interest in somewhat dysfunctional relationships, and especially ones dominated by seemingly benevolent but in fact quite abusive men. The sedatives scene is incredible, and really shows how good an actor Doris Day could be. However, while Roscoe says that in that version the characters are more fleshed out, you could also argue that these hints at ambiguity and complexity are not really developed, and get drowned out by the plot. Again, I agree more with dustybooks that the marriage in the original, for all the missing information, feels very ‘lived in’ and authentic, and that goes for the relationship between the parents and the child as well (which is rather perfunctory and idealised in the remake).

Interesting reading of the subtext by Mr Sausage. I’m not sure I have much to add, except it was noticeable that the parents are jokily abusive towards the daughter, with the mother repeatedly disowning her (‘never have children’, ‘your daughter made me lose’) and the father insulting her (‘shut up’, ‘fathead’, and of course telling her to ‘buzz off’ just before she gets kidnapped) in the early scenes. I loved the way Hitchcock develops the joke about the sweater, with Banks tying it to Fresnay’s jacket so that it unravels across the dancefloor. Then, just at the moment when the sweater disappears, someone shows Fresnay the thread on his back; he stops dancing, turns around to look; and that’s when he gets shot, confiding his deadly secret to the woman he’s been flirting with. So the sweater she’d knitted for him vanishes at the precise moment when it becomes redundant, since he’s not there to wear it anymore; the husband’s joking resentment towards this man is linked to his murder; and this is also the moment when the dying rival forces the couple into a dilemma between carrying out his mission and saving their own child. That’s what I love about Hitchcock: it’s a dramatically effective way of putting the audience off balance through a tonal shift, but it also plays into the little underlying tensions of the characters’ relationships, making the action more resonant and unsettling on a sort of subliminal level. (Obviously, Charles Bennett deserves credit here as well.)

where did he get that beanstalk named Cicely Oates from, who plays the evil church priestess?

She's brilliant, isn't she? Those shots in the hypnotism scene, where the image blurs until only part of her face remains clear, are quite chilling. Sadly it seems she was only in a few films before dying in December 1934, at the age of 45.

[Jonathan S]

Yes, the slow but inexorable unravelling of the knitting attached to Fresnay's jacket is like his thread of life gradually running out. It's one of several instances in the film of death being humorously or ironically portended by images, sounds or words, such as the chimes (of midnight?) heard from Lorre's watch in the final scene or, slightly earlier, the doomed policeman commenting on the "still warm" mattress: "I could do with a bit of a sleep on that meself". The next shot is a close-up of his head sinking into the same mattress for an eternal sleep.

The mattress recalls the heavy padding used to soundproof both sides of the dentist's surgery door - apparently designed to muffle patients' screams for those in the waiting room (though it's no more effective at that than the policeman's use of the mattress as a buffer against bullets), it actually masks far more sinister activities in the surgery. One wonders how the very visible tears in the padding came about... For me, this sequence is a highlight of the film; it's presaged by an ominous shot of rickety stairs, often associated with danger and death in Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho, etc.)

Banks' exchange of roles with the dentist is an early(ish) example of Hitch's interest in the interchangeability of his nominal heroes and villains. Played partly for laughs (fulfilling all our fantasies of turning the tables on our dentists!), it obviously lacks the intense moral ambiguity of Hitch's best explorations of this theme, but Banks is forced to commit a potentially lethal act in subjecting the dentist to gas (twice) - a procedure which he himself has just said should be done by a doctor.

If IMDb is correct, both TMWKTM and Richard Massingham's Tell Me if It Hurts were both premiered in December 1934, a fascinating coincidence as the short - one of British cinema's masterpieces in my opinion - is essentially a comic thriller about a visit to a dentist who somewhat resembles the one in Hitch's film and both wear round spectacles. There are several parallels between these two directors (born a year apart) starting with their physical resemblance, their vision of the everyday world as cruel and dangerous, the expression of that vision through macabre humour and their employment of both Soviet (or French) montage techniques and German Expressionism, especially in the creation of suspense.

Hitch's dentist sequence runs along similar lines to Massingham's. The introductory shot of the three-dimensional street sign, baring huge teeth, parallels the toothy magazine images that the patient constantly sees in Tell Me. The use of the waiting room to build fear and suspense before entry to the surgery is common to both films (and of course plays on our own memories of anxiety when waiting for the dentist), as are the terrifying shots of rows of gleaming instruments and other ominous equipment. The apparently innocuous banter between patient and dentist (actually just the latter droning on about weather, gardening and cricket in Massingham's film) ironically counterpoints the threats simultaneously being conveyed visually by both directors.

[Lemmy Caution]

Not too much to add.
Watched the original and remake back to back.
The original is entertaining if a bit patchy with some good moments and a rather somewhat blah shootout ending. I thought Edna Best was pretty terrible, though her role isn't large.
I found the remake barely watchable -- bloated, unfunny, creepy male dominance, weak plotting, etc.

I preferred the daughter in the original to the bland overdressed son in the remake.
I preferred the message with clues on the original film, to the Ambrose Chapel confusion in the 2nd.

It's not too believable that Stewart and wife just decide to go into the chapel and see if they can rescue their son, without calling the police. I think Stewart says something hokey like, "Let's see if we can handle this ourselves" despite needing to deal with ruthless killers.
Then when Jimmy Stewart is alone on the chapel along a sea of chairs, I wish Hitch gave a nod to the original and had him pick up a chair to begin a chair fight before getting conked on the head and knocked out. Rather weak that the baddies just leave and leave Stewart unconscious (not tied or locked up), so he can escape via the bell rope. And if not that, I'm sure there would have been windows for him to smash or whatever.

The idea of a gunshot hidden by the cymbal clash at the concert seems clever, until you realize that the gunman still has to be in the theater and get out, still might be seen or heard by those nearby, and the shooting will be noticed right away by those near the Prime Minister. So the only real advantage is the sound will be largely covered and the direction of fire likely unknown (unless somebody nearby sees or hears). It's a rather weak device presented as clever. The complication of timing the shooting with the music also makes it assassin's job more tense and less likely to be lethal. But really it's completely unclear why this can't be done in the home country, but I guess that starts overthinking the plot/issue.