‘Don’t you realise that Americans dislike having their children stolen?‘
Legendary director Alfred Hitchcock initially released the British spy thriller film The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 to much fanfare. Despite this, he still saw fit to become one of the few directors to have remade their own work. Released more than 20 years later in 1956, the American version is generally considered the best of the two; Hitch himself stated, “the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional”, and so, on this occasion, I’ll take him at face value…
An American couple played by James Stewart and Doris Day become embroiled in a kidnapping conspiracy when they accidentally find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time (continuing Hitchcock’s long-running fascination with the concept of the Wrong Man).
The third of four collaborations between Hitchcock and Stewart, The Man Who Knew Too Much is sandwiched between Rear Window and Vertigo, which perhaps explains why it is one of Hitchcock’s lesser-known films. This is unfortunate because Stewart and Day are both brilliant, Bernard Herrmann’s ominous score works as a precursor to the excellent work he would deliver with Vertigo, and the long Royal Albert Hall sequence towards the end of the film is the epitome of pure cinema.
The idea of an ordinary man (or couple in this case) getting in over their head is a common theme in Hitchcock’s work, and nobody plays an everyman like James Stewart. It’s no wonder they worked together so much; Hitchcock certainly knew how to get the best out of him. His bewilderment and incredulity here is a joy to behold and he shares a much more convincing chemistry with Doris Day than he did with Kim Novak in Vertigo two years later. Day herself, while very much playing second fiddle to Stewart, is also great throughout, particularly in the latter half of the film where she has to portray a grieving mother.
I don’t know whether The Man Who Knew Too Much works as a remake (I’ll get around to the original one day), but I do know that it works as a film on its own merit. While it’s not one of Hitchcock’s best films, that is only because the bar is set so ridiculously high elsewhere. It also introduced the world to Que Sera, Sera (for which Day won a Best Original Song statuette) – another Hitchcock classic.
