The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

 

The Man Who Knew Too Much is one of my favorite films by Alfred Hitchcock. I know that it’s considered a “minor” masterpiece of his, but the story, the performances, the effective use of music—all of them and other elements combine to make such an entertaining film. I find it tough to resist. Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day play Ben and Jo McKenna, who are in Morocco for a vacation with their son Hank (Christopher Olsen) when the young boy is kidnapped. A stranger named Louis Bernard (Daniel Gelin) gets killed in the streets of Marrakesh and leaves Stewart’s Ben with a whispered clue before he dies. Soon it becomes apparent that the McKennas are caught up in some bizarre international intrigue based upon a misunderstanding of who they are, something that ultimately involves an ambitious ambassador who wants to move up in the hierarchy of his home country. Really, though, those details hardly matter. In a Hitchcock films, it’s not really about the plot; it’s about the suspense that can be created. What strikes me about most Hitchcock films is how he often lets the audience know much more than the characters do. It helps to increase the tension and make us far more anxious when we can figure things out faster than the characters can. We figure out who the villains are and what they’re up to while Ben and Jo are trying to figure out, for example, who or what Ambrose Chappell or Ambrose Chapel is and what he/it has to do with Hank’s disappearance. I also love how Hitchcock can focus in on a particular moment or image, such as when Stewart is thumbing a phone book while someone else is on the phone. He needs to find his son and he needs to get information to his wife, but he can’t let the other characters in the scene know too much. Steward was one of Hitchcock’s favorite actors, and he’s pretty tightly wound here. You can always sense that he could lash out at someone in an instant. Day, always such a welcome presence on the screen, introduces a song in the film that would become her signature recording, “Whatever Will Be (Que Sera, Sera),” first as a song that she sings to Hank in order to get him to go to bed. Later it takes on even more psychological impact when it serves as the means to find Hank after his kidnapping. It’s clever of Hitchcock to use Day’s talent as a singer to make a plot point even more poignant. Music plays another integral role in the film’s plot when Jo and Ben have to try to stop an attempted assassination at the Royal Albert Hall. An orchestra is performing “Storm Cloud” by Bernard Hermann, Hitchcock’s favorite composer, and the crash of the cymbals at a key moment during the performance is supposed to be a cue for the would-be assassin. The sequence just goes on and on, and we are in our own form as terror as we watch Jo, helpless to stop what’s coming, listen and anticipate the fatal note. It’s quite a sequence in both its use of music and in the superb editing for which Hitchcock’s films are known. The Man Who Knew Too Much also has its fair share of those little touches of Hitchcockian humor. For example, one of the conspirators in the kidnapping asks, “Don’t you know that Americans dislike having their children stolen?” Well, of course, they do. It’s also hilarious that Stewart at one point has to climb out of a bell tower in order to escape being trapped. By the time we watch the camera move up a flight of stairs to where Hank is being held prisoner, you know you’re still in the hands of a master filmmaker. He saves one of his best moments for last. When Ben and Jo return with Hank after what must have been many hours away from the friends they’ve left in their apartment, all Ben says is “Sorry we were gone so long, but we had to pick up Hank.” Of course, they did; that’s the whole point of the movie, after all, isn’t it?

Oscar Win: Best Song (“Whatever Will Be [Que Sera Sera]”)