The Man Who Knew Too Much
                                                    
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Year: 1934
Rating: 7.0
I expect a lot of Alfred Hitchcock fans, as do I, think of this film as really the beginning of his career as the Master of Suspense that would stick with him for the rest of his life. He had directed some seventeen films before this (though that number is problematic since he occasionally directed the same film twice in different languages), but they were a mixed lot. He directed light comedies, melodramas, biographies and a few crime films – Blackmail, The Lodger, Murder and Number 17. Most of them were also silent film with Blackmail being released in both a silent version and a talkie one. Blackmail in 1929 had been a big hit but since then he had been in the doldrums and had left the studio British International Films after Number 17 (1932) to direct an independent film, a biography of the Strauss family and the rivalry between father and son. He called this the low ebb of his career. Two contacts though were about to occur that were to change that.



He bumped into Michael Balcon who had produced Hitchcock’s first film The Pleasure Garden in 1925 for Gainsborough Pictures. Hitchcock was 25 years old at the time.  Balcon was to produce four more Hitchcock films while at Gainsborough but now he had moved to Gaumont. Balcon is one of the more fascinating characters in the British film industry. First Gainsborough, then Gaumont, next the head of MGM – British and finally the head of Ealing when they made all those wonderful comedies. Balcon invited Hitchcock to come make a film and gave him a middling budget to do so. The other person he became acquainted with was Charles Bennett. Bennett had been the author of the play that Blackmail was based on and he and Hitchcock were to become great friends and collaborators. He was to be the scriptwriter on most of Hitchcock’s British films.



The two of them had been trading ideas for a while and initially the script was going to be a Bulldog Drummond film based on one of Sapper’s (H.C. McNeile) novels. There had already been a Drummond film produced in 1929 starring Ronald Colman and two more were released in the same year this film came out. Fortunately, they went off in a different direction – to some degree influenced by a real event when a group of Anarchists had a big shootout with the police – which is the last section of this film. Instead, they made it into an international spy film – the first in a series of films like that – the 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Notorious and North by Northwest – all among my favorite Hitchcock films. Hitchcock had become concerned about the rise of Germany and Italy and the march towards war that he was witnessing though I don’t think he ever named them in his films.



A family of father, mother and daughter are vacationing in Switzerland when a murder brings them into the intrigue. One of Hitchcock’s recurring themes was the innocent amateur who gets drawn into espionage and murder – here it is an entire family. It begins pleasantly enough – a ski competition that the daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam – later in Hitchcock’s Young and Innocent) messes up by running into the track to save a dog – and then later a Clay Pigeon shooting competition that she messes up by distracting her mother (Edna Best) allowing the hulking Ramon (Frank Vosper) to win. The mother laughingly tells him she will win the next match. Truer words were never spoken.



Later the mother and a friend of the family are dancing and you might wonder what is going on between them when suddenly a shot through the window kills him. It is sudden and shocking. His last whispered words to the mother are, I am a British secret agent. I have a paper hidden in a brush in my room. Deliver it to the British authorities. And the MacGuffin is introduced into the plot. The husband gets the note right ahead of the police but the daughter is kidnapped and he is warned that if they say anything, she will be killed. Later they have to decide whether to hand the paper over and stop a possible war or save their daughter.



There are two very fine set pieces in the film – the shootout at the end between the police and the terrorists - and the concert scene in which Ramon is to assassinate a leader of another country and start that war. Hitchcock does a great job of squeezing the suspense out of the scene flashing between the assassin, the dignitary, the mother in the audience and the symphony waiting for the clash of the cymbals, when the shot is to be fired. The leader of the terrorists is the wonderful Peter Lorre. His performance as the charming and ruthless killer is mesmerizing, his cigarette always hanging limply out of his mouth, his hair combed down menacingly, his eyes shifting back and forth between amusement and deadly psychosis. This was his first English film after escaping from Hitler and Germany. M had made him a star and Hitchcock wanted him. At the time Lorre spoke no English he says. When he was interviewed by Hitchcock, he guessed by his body language whether he should say yes or no. He is the star of the film though not the main character.



The film feels a bit rough now, much too rushed with not enough time to care about the people. It runs for 75 minutes while Hitchcock’s remake is 2 hours in length. He said at one time that he much preferred the original and at another time, that he preferred the remake. The two main leads don’t add much pizzazz to the film – earnest performances but little charisma. In his next film Hitchcock solved all this. 39 Steps is a classic, much smoother in its narrative and looks better – and of course Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll are perfect. This film though was a big hit with the audiences – it felt new and fresh and Hitchcock never looked back. The ironic things is that the man actually knows very little. The note is just the MacGuffin but of little value.