neithernor2000 Review of The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

A man who knew too little

[9/10 · 5 March 2005]

I am a man who knew too little about the DVD culture, having owned a DVD player for only the two most recent months of my 55 years of watching movies or television or just sleeping in a crib. One of the first DVD movies I purchased was done so not so much for cinematic fulfillment but for budgetary reasons. The choices were THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH with Alfred Hitchcock's name above the title and a couple of yuppies on the cover for $13 or the same movie title with a scar-faced Peter Lorre exuding evil on the jewel box cover. The latter jumped out at me from the budget bin. It is the original 1934 b&w version wherein Mr. Hitchcock's name appears in petite pica on the bottom line of the screen title card. I paid $2.87 for the original MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and believe that the then relatively unknown Mr. Hitchcock's paid slightly more than that for special effects, like when a skiing contestant in the Swiss Alps stumbles down a mountain to avoid a dog and the teenager who is chasing it. This is where Peter Lorre's character earns his scar tissue and, in this opening scene, one witnesses murder, wit and suspense as evolved in the mind of Alfred Hitchcock. "The Prime Minister of the Sinister" filled half the cast with his legislators of evil and the other half with Leslie Banks and Edna Best as the teenager's parents, who have their daughter forcibly removed from their lives by Germanic- sounding assassins. The conspirators are compared to the assassins of Archduke Ferdinand, which resulted in World War I. There is irony flavored with political prescience here: the original MWKTM was filmed in 1934 when Adolf Hitler was still referred to in small pica and none of the assassins are Aryan blonde–though totally plausible–but the courageous hero of the film is a blonde from England. Rather than heap ten more paragraphs of praise for this Hitchcock thriller that provided the firmament for a spectacular career, allow this viewer, who knew too little about a lot of things, to guarantee the reader that another legendary director, five years before making Citizen Kane, responded enthusiastically and inspirationally to this 1934 film. Though Orson Welles' The Third Man has a more obvious Hitchcock influence, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH is where it all began. Luckily for him, I also guarantee that Orson Welles paid considerably less than I did to witness this stunning embryonic journey of a film-making genius.