The Man Who Knew Too Much (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)- Review

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Presenting Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifetime Achievement Award for the American Film Institute in 1979, George Stevens Jr pointed out that the director’s historic contribution “came not in a flashy show of innovation, but steadily, continuously, meticulously, in a body of work which displays an immaculate articulation of both image and sound.” The breadth and the skill of the articulation of both elements in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) are apparent in its two musical extremes: a 12-minute wordless sequence set to a cantata in the Royal Albert Hall, and a number-one chart ditty for Doris Day.

Hitchcock’s 1956 remake grafts the British zaniness of his 1934 original onto the model of the globalized American studio system. The result - a story of Americans abroad, told by a cockney in Hollywood - sees homely songstress Doris Day tangling with Moroccan child labourers, and winsome everyman James Stewart wrecking a Bayswater taxidermist’s workshop, in a kaleidoscope of physical, visual and emotional settings. The sheer range of the storytelling attests to Hitchcock’s ability to stir an audience with whatever tools he has at his disposal, incorporating his own panoply of directional and personal experience.

The Man Who Knew Too Much began life as a black and white 1934 melodrama about a British couple and their teenage daughter, portrayed by fairly obscure British actors, in the less exotic climes of Switzerland. Hitchcock’s 1956 version moves the action to Morocco, with Hollywood heavyweights James Stewart and Doris Day as American parents of an adorable if grating young son, shot in glorious colour and VistaVision. Yet despite the alterations to tone and budget, the director retains a focus on family dynamics, exchanging 1930s English eccentricity for 1950s American social aspiration. In both films, he capably wrings culture-specific humour and universal suspense from depictions of two contrasting families in the same situation- entanglement in a political plot and the kidnapping of the child.

Reflecting on the two films with François Truffaut, Hitchcock suggested that “the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.” This statement seems to chime with Hitchcock’s method of revision: he applies his expanded resources where they might improve the film, but has the wisdom to refrain where they might not.

As a notable example, both versions climax at a performance of a specially composed cantata by extremely minor Australian composer Arthur Benjamin, a gloriously melodramatic confection for chorus and orchestra. When frequent collaborator Bernard Hermann composed the soundtrack for the 1956 version, he declined to re-score the scene, choosing only to expand the orchestration and the length of the piece with added repeats. The result - the incessant thundering of the cantata - drowns out the frantically mimed dialogue, prompting a noticeable shift in style to that of the silent movie, in which Hitchcock began his career.

The other musical highlight of the film, Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera Sera’, demonstrates Hitchcock’s willingness to make alterations using the Hollywood machine at his disposal, and sharpen certain messages in the remake. Leveraging Day’s status as an all-singing, all-dancing, all-American box office titan after Calamity Jane two years earlier, Hitchcock changed the mother’s character from an expert markswoman to a famous singer, semi-retired in service of her husband and son.

Rather than saving her child with her gun, in the manner of the mother in the 1934 film, or indeed that of Calamity Jane, Day’s Mrs McKenna uses the weapon of her voice: her song miraculously pierces the walls of the embassy where young Hank is imprisoned. Beyond simply providing a catchy tune for Day- it would become a signature song for the rest of her life- the prominence of ‘Que Sera Sera’, another original composition, comments on the peculiarities of 1950s American family structure. Mrs McKenna has given up her international career in deference to her husband’s Indianapolis medical practice; that same husband lies to her about losing their child, then forcibly sedates her before admitting his error. The dubious actions of Dr McKenna jar deliciously with James Stewart’s screen persona as an upstanding American everyman, just as in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Making use of the grand cultural forces at his disposal- from chart-topping popular song to Hollywood icons- Hitchcock’s transatlantic remake pokes at the darkness beneath the external Technicolour sunshine of the post-war nuclear family, and wider society.

Áine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.