The earliest signs that the filmmaker would one day to be branded as “The Master of Suspense” in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent classic “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog.” But it took the advent of sound, and several outings with the new technology, for him to discover that thrillers could and should be witty fun.
“The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934) has a lot of ways of showing its age. For a picture that opens on a Swiss ski slope and climaxes with an assassination attempt at the Royal Albert Hall, it’s awfully soundstage-bound. Everybody on set under-reacts to every fright and act of violence they witness or are threatened with. The “fight choreography” of the day is downright dainty.
But it is devilishly funny, such as in the ways an indulged, privileged child (Nova Pilbeam) almost gets people killed and then finds herself kidnapped, with her parents not allowed to let the world know this.
Those parents — played by Leslie Banks of “The Most Dangerous Game” and “Jamaica Inn” and Edna Best (also seen in “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir”) — seem almost relieved.
“Whisky and soda?”
It’s as if the murderous mastermind (Peter Lorre in his first English-speaking role) is wasting his breath on these Brits with his warning, “You should learn to control your fatherly feelings.”
But this daffy, amusing thriller was a template for many a Hitchcock classic to follow, and not just the 1956 remake where he had Doris Day sing for her missing child. An exotic location or two, violence in a theater or very public place, ordinary people entangled in an extraordinarily sinister plot, police who are of little use or outright impediments to justice and a blonde who either drives the action of delivers the coup de grace became as much a part of the Hitchcock brand as his already-established “cameos” and Hitchcockian twists.
St. Moritz is where we meet the Lawrences, “Captain” Bill (Banks), precocious daughter Betty (Pilbeam) and target-shooting champ Jill (Best), who is spending entirely too much time with the French ski jumper Louis (Pierre Fresnay).
“You can KEEP your Betty,” she jokes. “I’m off with ANOTHER man!”‘
She and that other man are on the dance floor when the shot is fired, from a distance and through a window. Louis seems almost embarassed by this turn of events as he is the first character to sink, ever-so-slowly, to the floor, mortally wounded.
There’s a hidden note that Bill must retrieve from Louis’ hotel room, leading to a lot of fuss from the German Swiss authorities. Because Bill and Jill have gotten their own note that warns them they’ll never see their daughter again if they turn over what they’ve procured to British authorities.
Jill’s slow, crumpling faint at reading this is silent cinema silly, drawn-out by design.
The couple returns to London without their little girl, which draws official attention, and not just from the coppers. The foreign office is onto them and wants what Louis wanted to pass on.
Dash it all, there’s nothing for it but for Bill to start his own investigation, based on the note, with his man Sinclair (Hugh Wakefield) in tow.
Sinclair will endure hyponitism, a tooth-pulling from an underworld dentist and arrest for his friend. Bill starts to put this all together when he sees that sniggering Euro-fop Abbott (Lorre) whom he met on the slopes and the sharp shooter (Frank Vosper) who bested his wife in skeet shooting in Abbott’s company.
Comic misunderstandings give way to genuine suspense as that dentist whips out his picks and laughing gas, Betty cries in fear on the phone and Abbott makes threat after threat to avoid having his carefully-planned — right down to the Royal Albert Hall concert crescendo meant to cover the sound of the shot — assassination attempt exposed.
“Tell her they may soon be leaving us. Leaving us for a long, long journey. How is it that Shakespeare says? “From which no traveler returns.” Great poet.“
“The Man Who Knew Too Much” was the start of a legendary English-language (and Hollywood) career for Lorre, who was freshly-fled from Nazi Germany when he met Hitchcock, was cast and then learned to speak English for this role.
Hitchcock’s motto that “Good villains make good thrillers” served Lorre wonderfully in a string of classic films, including “The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca,” Hitchcock’s “Secret Agent,” “Mad Love” and hilariously sending up his screen image a decade after “Man Who Knew Too Much” in “Arsenic and Old Lace.”
“The Man Who Knew Too Much” trots by in a brisk hour and sixteen minutes, with clever turns and cleverer turns of phrase. Viewed now, it feels like a rough draft for the better thrillers Hitchcock would direct, starting with the crackling “39 Steps” mere months later.
But it remains a primer on thriller scripting, plotting, staging and editing, a movie Hitchcock was wise to return to after his mostly melodramatic and serious early Hollywood outings, a master filmmaker hittting his witty stride in the 1950s, where he gave us “Strangers on a Train,” “To Catch a Thief,” “Vertigo,” “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window” and his lightest, deadliest triumph, “North by Northwest,” most of them variations on the bag of tricks he first opened in “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”
Rating: “Approved” (TV-PG), violence
Cast: Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Frank Vosper, Hugh Wakefield, Nova Pilbeam and Pierre Fresnay.
Credits: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, scripted by Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham Lewis. A British Gaumont release, a Corinth-restoration on Tubi, Amazon, et al.
Running time: 1:16
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