The Man Who Knew Too Much

A British film that begins at a ski resort in Switzerland. Bob and Jill are on holiday. Their daughter Betty is with them and they have made friends with a Frenchman. One night Louis is shot in the ballroom. Dying, he tells Bob something: there is a brush in his room with a message inside. The message is a plan for an assassination. A statesman is to be killed in London. Bob does not go to the police. Because their daughter has been taken. A note arrives; if he speaks the child dies. From there the film is a search. They return to London, a dentist's surgery, a chapel and a concert hall. The chapel scene is the film's best constructed. A service is going on, the congregation is singing, and Bob works out there who is who. Then the concert comes. The assassination will happen at a particular moment in an orchestral work; a cymbal crash will cover the shot. Jill is in the hall. She knows what is coming and all she can do is scream. What the narrative is interested in is not espionage but being forced into silence: its tension comes from two people who know and cannot speak. Abbott leads the gang. Peter Lorre entered English-language cinema with this part and did not speak the language at the time; he learned his lines by imitating the sounds he heard. The last section is a gun battle in a street. It is taken from a real siege that had happened in England. Hitchcock made the same story again in America twenty-two years later. This is the first version, and it is shorter, rougher and faster. Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre and Nova Pilbeam are in the cast. Alfred Hitchcock directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes early Hitchcock and British cinema of the 1930s. Who it is not for: anyone looking for technical polish; the film is over in seventy-five minutes and some sections look hurried.