The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Or, The Movie Which Did Too Little.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Grade: C+
We admired Peter Lorre’s memorably evil performance in Fritz Lang's M; we enjoyed early Hitchcock films The 39 Steps and especially The Lady Vanishes. So wouldn't another early Hitchcock movie with another “evil Lorre” performance be pretty good?
Well, not really. It’s not as bad as a real screw-up like Spellbound or the abysmal latter-day Hitchcock movies, but this is certainly a far cry from great. It’s got some mildly enjoyable stuff in it, and a fair amount that just feels lazy.
Not that anybody needs my opinion, but the best Hitchcocks are The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Notorious, and North by Northwest. There. That’s four really entertaining movies, each by pretty talented writers and with very entertaining actors. There’s also the pretty-good ones with entertaining things in them, like Joseph Cotten, Thelma Ritter, Robert Walker. That’s a good enough record for any director’s career; do we keep needing to think of Hitchcock as some kind of god?
Apparently so. Several contemporary reviews of this one mention how it “establishes many of the signature themes that would permeate Hitchcock’s later masterpieces,” or words to that effect. Like “the MacGuffin,” Hitchcock’s pet name for a little plot point that the characters all care about but the audience doesn’t, and really isn’t important to the plot. And villains that have a streak of dark humor. So, nope, if Hitchcock had never existed, we’d never have funny bad guys or unimportant plot holes, nobody would EVER have thought of those.
The bad guy here is Peter Lorre, who Hitchcock was wowed by in M, and who had JUST fled the Nazis for England, so he was willing to take whatever tiny role he was offered. Wisely, once Hitchcock met Lorre, he gave him the head baddie role instead. There’s not much to it until the end bits, but Lorre’s voice is neatly menacingly soothing. How’d he ever become a great stage actor with a voice that low-key? Well, knowing how to “project” is a thing…
Yer good guys are Edna Best and Leslie Banks (the mad hunter in The Most Dangerous Game). They’re in the Alps for the Olympics or the Alpine Games or Camp Snoopy’s Sno-Daze or whatever, where Best is competing as a trap shooter. (Why not in the biathlon? Wouldn't that be a more snowy thing? Whatever.) Anyhoo, they bump into Lorre, who’s traveling with his “nurse” for some reason and gives everybody the spooks then disappears.
There’s a dancing scene soon after with a rather annoying bit of “comic” business involving a wool sweater unraveling. Hopefully this movie didn’t invent that tired gag; if so, we need the Terminator to go back and stop it from being born. But suddenly, a shot rings out; the ski jumper Banks is dancing with notices blood spreading on his shirt. He’s been shot, and promptly dies. (Spielberg duplicates this in the opening of Temple of Doom.) Before the ski jumper dies, he mumbles some cryptic words; those will lead to a cryptic hidden piece of paper. (Thanks to this site for helping me remember some of these annoying details.)
When Best and Banks get back to their hotel room, they find out their teenage daughter has been kidnapped! And a note tells them not to talk, or their daughter gets it. Best and Banks do as the kidnappers say, and don’t mention what the ski jumper told them. Even though it might prevent a terrible assassination, the police say!
So, I guess that’s the plot? The moral dilemma of, save your child versus saving some stranger? I don’t think most parents would waver too much on that one, unless their child was a REALLY whiny teenager and the stranger was Tom Hanks. Nor does the movie seem to really care about this! Since as soon as they get back to England, Banks enlists his buddy Hugh Wakefield in finding the baddies themselves, and it’s a laff-fest.
Seriously! Banks and Wakefield start looking for the baddies at a shady dentist, because when searching for kidnappers/assassins, always begin at a dentist’s office. Wakefield goes inside the dentist’s closed room first, and starts making howls of pain. Banks considers saving him for a minute then… nah. It’ll be funny to joke about at the pub over. Wakefield comes out, holding his jaw, and Banks goes in — but then the dentist tries EVIL stuff, and there’s a fight scene, and Banks wins (using dentist knockout gas).
Because that’s not enough hijinks, the two of them find a “Sun Tabernacle” full of (almost exclusively) women. Singing praises to the Giver of Light and Warmth and such. Banks and Wakefield start feeling rather consciously out of place, so they begin mumbling along to the praise song — Banks even ad-libbing a few words making fun of this preposterous situation.
That’s fine — Banks is fine, he amuses me (he did in Most Dangerous Game, too). But, does anyone remember the PLOT? That they’re searching for Banks’s kidnapped daughter? Then again, she is 13 or so. Might have entered an “annoying” phase. Maybe Banks just thinks of it as a needed break from the kid?
Eventually the Sun Tabernacle is shown as the front for the baddies’ lair, Banks gets captured, and things start rolling towards the series of climaxes. There’s the promised assassination attempt, there’s Banks and his daughter trying to escape, there’s a big ol’ shootout with police. None of which makes any real sense in tandem with any of the other bits, but they all have their moderately entertaining moments. Edna Best even gets to do her Sporting Skills again.
We meet Lorre’s nurse from the opener again, and it’s clear she’s no nurse, she’s an enemy mastermind. It’s Cicely Oates, who has a TERRIFIC “bad guy” stare, and I wondered why Wiki didn’t have a page for her. It’s because this was one of her first movie roles, and she died two weeks after the movie came out, at only age 45. Awful. She could have been in a lot of memorable little parts — she’s got a great presence. She and Lorre have a really fun scene where Wakefield arrives with the cops and they convince the cops he’s a crazy drunk. She’s got a great death scene, too -- it’s clear her and Lorre mean a lot to each other.
The assassination attempt takes place at the Albert Hall, with a gimmick so nice Hitchcock used it twice. Lorre plays a record of the symphony being performed that night and tells his assassin to time his gun shot for a moment in the symphony when the symbols clash. At the Albert Hall, Edna Best gets to be spooked and there’s menacing shots of a guy in the shadows, but this really isn’t very well staged, and the resolution of it is clumsy. (The “Mr. Memory” scenes in 39 Steps are more entertaining.)
Probably wanting a second go at it, Hitchcock remade this in 1956, with James Stewart and Doris Day in the Banks/Best roles. I don’t recall much about it except that the assassination-at-a-concert scene is done a little better. The audience knows exactly WHEN the key music cue will come, so it amps up the tension a bit. I remember finding most of the rest boring. I don’t remember who the baddies were. Doris Day sings “Que Sera, Sera” very dramatically, and the song was a huge hit. So if the idea of Doris Day dramatically beltng out “Que Sera, Sera” appeals to you, go find someone who owns that movie and dentist-gas them asleep and watch their DVD.1
Probably the movie’s best highlight — besides Lorre — is the big police shootout at the end. Make any plot sense? No. But it was a way to shoehorn in a big action sequence, one that the BFI says was inspired by the real-life 1911 “Siege of Sidney Street.” Two anarchist revolutionary types on the run, cornered by the cops, managed to hold out for six hours against the outgunned police. A newsreel camera was on hand, and caught footage of an interested local member of Parliament, Winston Churchill. Afterwards, when the newsreel was run, some members of the audience yelled “shoot him” — Churchill not being very popular at the time.
The scene’s just presented as massive chaos, here, which seems realistic to me. Most MODERN police standoffs with advanced weaponry and communications end up complete fuster clucks, so I’d imagine it was just as bad back then. Cops and baddies drop like flies, and there’s actually an emotional moment. Lorre has a neat finish, too.
If you need to know who to blame for this convoluted script, a site called TheAlfredHitchcockWiki has you covered. Essentially, this was an attempt to adapt a popular book series for the screen, which fell through, and parts of that script were salvaged and worked on by a zillion different rewriters until everyone thought it’d be a popular hit. (They were right, at least — unlike modern movies that get a million rewrites to make them more popular and still bomb.) The best thing I learned from HitchcockWiki? That Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, was a major collaborative contributor throughout his career. And to his credit, Hitchcock acknowledged this in public.
The most annoying thing I learned from HitchcockWiki? That Hitchcock ‘“walked onto the set on the first day of shooting, banged the script down on a table and announced “Another picture in the bag!’” It’s one of my biggest beefs with the guy. He could be awfully lazy about shooting a movie, focusing only on the big “suspense” scenes.
Take the early Alps sequence here. It’s got a ton of hideously fake mountain backgrounds. It looks terrible. (Compare it to how good the fake dockside looks in The Threepenny Opera, which came out three years earlier.) I realize nobody actually had the budget to go to Switzerland in those days, but why not re-write the opening scene to take place on a country club in France? That’d be easy enough to do. There’s some Hitchcock movies that look good; Notorious positively shimmers. But there’s enough with really sloppy sequences, and his color films usually looked awful. Then again, most color films of the period looked pretty bad, too.
I don’t mean to spend so much time bagging on Hitchcock. He could have a good instinct for using actors, like he does with Lorre (and the sadly doomed Cicely Oates) here. He was generally fine with good scripts and bad with bad ones — what director isn’t? I just think he’s a little overvenerated as a Deep Artiste. I think he was more interested in selling tickets than anything else. Which isn’t a sin! At least, at his best, he gave us material well worth selling tickets for. He was no Michael Bay.
(Warning, NSFW swearing in that.)
Incidentally, for fun, here’s an image I found for this movie from a big retailer website. The retailer’s name rhymes with “Paul Blart.”
Um, that’s NOT The Man Who Knew too Much. It’s Peter Lorre as the pre-war Japanese secret agent/detective “Mr. Moto.” I know because I saw all of those on TV when I was like seven or so. (And all the Warner Oland “Charlie Chan” movies.) Lorre made eight of these in three years, so that tells you what cheapos they were. He hated them, but they were popular. When Lorre quit, the series died, although Fox tried rebooting it in 1965 with fun character actor Henry Silva. It… didn’t take. It had Ian Fleming in a small role! Not the same Fleming.
Hitchcock kept the film from being re-released until after he died; that’s unusual, since before home video because popular, re-releasing old hits was a good way for studios to grab a few extra bucks on the cheap.