Turner Classic Movies is an indispensable service for people interested in cinema. The cable service programs films in ways that promote interesting avenues for study and comparison. Alfred Hitchcock remade his 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew too Much in 1955. In October 2023, both films seem curiously timely: the movies involve a terrorist cell that takes a hostage and attempts an assassination in London. In the '34 version, the movie involves an oddly disengaged and stoic British couple whose daughter is taken by some Ruritanian/Mittel-Europaische assassins working in concert with a few decidedly eccentric English under the direction of a sneering, if soft-spoken, Peter Lorre as spymaster -- at stake is nothing less than a possible World War; the bad guys are plotting to kill a minor ambassador in a crime that alludes to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. In keeping with changes in the World Order, the 1955 version involves a brusque ugly American, a surgeon from Indianapolis played by Jimmy Stewart in a state of continuous and scarcely restrained hysteria -- Stewart's character is so high-strung that his marriage to a famous singer Jo Conway (played by Doris Day) is imperiled even before their precocious annoying son, Hank, who is about eight years old is kidnapped by the terrorists. Both movies feature a famous suspense sequence involving an assassination planned to occur at the Royal Albert Hall during the performance of a ludicrously elephantine cantata -- the assassin will fire his fatal shot at the instant the cymbals strike on stage. After the assassination is thwarted, both films feature an extended coda, anti-climactic in the 1955 version but central to the earlier film, in which the hostage is rescued. Although the movies involve, more or less, the same plot, they are quite strikingly different. Hitchcock obviously regarded this thriller as central to his ouevre. It's the only one of his films that he re-made. The 1934 picture catapulted Hitchcock to world-wide fame as the "master of suspense", a reputation that impelled his career, but, also, limited him in many respects. Hitchcock told Truffaut that he regarded the 1934 film as the work of a "talented amateur" but felt the 1955 version was superior in all respects. Hitchcock is always obsessed with the tricks of the trade, that is, the mechanics of making movies and there is, no doubt, that the technicolor wide-screen '55 film is technically far better than the somewhat crude and low-budget effects in the earlier picture. But there is more to movie-making than mechanical perfection and picture-quality and Hitchcock was so perverse in all respects that there's no reason to believe that he told Truffaut the truth when he expressed his evaluation of the two pictures to the French critic and film-maker.
The '34 film begins in St. Moritz during a winter sports competition. The images are all stock footage or very stylized rear projection. The characters stand out starkly in front of a hazy and pale mountain landscape -- it's all faded whites with ghostly peaks in the background. An English couple meet a French downhill skier, Louis Bernard, when their daughter, Betty, lets her dachshund dart across the slope and has to retrieve the dog; the rear projection shots showing Bernard's reaction to the dog and his fall on the hill are remarkably bad. Later, the wife, Jill, competes in a trap-shooting context but is, also, distracted, and misses her shot. That night, there's a dance in which Jill flirts with Louis Bernard and, indeed, implies that she intends to sleep with him. Perversely, Bob, the husband, seems to encourage her -- he feigns tears but seems oddly indifferent to his wife's overtures to the handsome Louis. (There's something kinky going on here -- Hitchcock suggests that these gestures toward infidelity are just some sort of marital game, but the scenes have a nasty edge to them.) Bernard is killed while dancing with Jill. However as he is dying, he gives a message to Jill. Jill tells Bob to go to Bernard's room where he retrieves from a shaving kit an enigmatic inscription on a small piece of paper. Meanwhile, the couple's daughter, Betty, has been kidnapped and spirited away from St. Moritz to London. Jill and Bob are afraid to involve the police since they have been told that this will cause the terrorists to execute Betty, but they do advise the authorities that their daughter has been kidnapped. In London, Bob and a feckless sidekick follow clues on the note to encounter a sinister dentist. The poor sidekick sacrifices a tooth to the quest to find Betty. Bob uses the dentist's gas to knock the villain out and, then, traces the conspiracy to a gloomy church building, a ramshackle structure in a slum occupied by the Tabernacle of the Sun. The Sun tabernacle worshippers are led by a dour, scary-looking woman who is in league with Peter Lorre. (Peter Lorre was lurking around the edges of the winter sports competition in St. Moritz,chainsmoking and making scarcely intelligible jests -- it's said he didn't know English and had to learn his lines phonetically.) The congregation in the tabernacle seem to comprise a terrorist cell of eccentric fanatics who may also be some kind of spiritualists -- their creed is bizarre and seems to involve sacramental hypnotism. Bob and his sidekick infiltrates the peculiar worship service; the sidekick gets summoned to the pulpit where he is hypnotized and passes out. Peter Lorre recognizes Bob and there's a incredibly strange fight conducted by throwing wooden chairs at one another -- the floor of the church ends up covered in fragments of broken chairs. Bob is overcome and imprisoned with Betty who is in cheerless upstairs attic in the tabernacle. Meanwhile, Jill has figured out that "Albert Hall" is a place, specifically, a concert hall, and not a person as she earlier believed. She goes to Albert Hall where an assassin with the bloated face of a corpse fished out of the water after being dead a week is planning to kill the ambassador, covering the discharge of his long gun with the crash of the cymbals. Jill screams just before the percussionist crashes the cymbals together and the ghastly-looking assassin misses his shot. The police converge on the Tabernacle of the Sun, positioning snipers in a brothel nearby and someone's shabby apartments -- they use a mattress and a piano respectively as barricades in their windows. At this point, the film becomes a combat picture with street-fighting involving a half-dozen casualties -- dead cops are fallen in the middle of the street. After the terrorists are mostly killed, Bob is gunned down in a stairwell, but Betty gets onto the roof of the tabernacle where she is pursued by the assassin with the swollen face. The assassin wrestles with her and seems ready to toss her off the parapet. But Jill, a champion trap shooter seizes a rifle from a cop and, with her unerring aim, kills the bad guy. Peter Lorre is shot repeated where he is hiding behind a door and it turns out that Bob was merely winged -- he gains consciousness to embrace his wife and daughter.
The movie is brisk and moves along at a high-pace, scarcely pausing to explain itself as it lunges from one episode to another. In contrast to the rather slow-paced '55 version, the movie is devised as a series of thrilling or sinister encounters without much in the way of narrative integument. Lorre is a striking villain; he has the world's worst comb over, a few strands of greasy hair scarcely covering his bone white scalp and his hair as well shows a pale streak like a skunk. (Lorre gives the '34 version an edge over the '55 reprise; he's a far better villain than the rather uninteresting clerical bad guy in the later film.) Gripping a cigarette in his jaw, he giggles and, in the combat scenes, morosely helps to reload the guns used by the men and women shooting out the windows -- the bad guys are heavily armed with carbines and big suitcase-sized ammo boxes. The worshipers at the Tabernacle of the Sun are all half-crazed elderly women and men. The battle scenes are intensely exciting, shot in chiaroscuro of flashing gun muzzles and police searchlights. Since this is the U.K., the cops aren't well-armed (they don't have as good guns as the terrorists and don't really know how to use them). The scenes at the Royal Albert Hall, involving a cantata called "Storm Clouds" are very effective and staged against a coherent concert hall space. Bob is a figure of fun, a wannabe cuckold it seems, and he is mostly passive throughout the movie -- he gasses the evil dentist and hurls chairs in the bizarre chair-fight scene but he's obviously a secondary comic character compared to his resolute wife who actually shoots the assassin off the roof of the dowdy Tabernacle. The Man Who Knew too Much is not really a Hitchcock film as we have come to know this director's work -- it's a fast (80 minute) comical thriller with a dual climax: the scenes at the Royal Albert Hall are recognizably Hitchcock, but the street fighting, the film's second climax, is something else entirely. (It reminds me that there's a battle scene in The Lady Vanishes as well that looks like it could have been directed by John Ford.) The fighting at the tabernacle solves a problem that is obvious in the remake -- the rescue of Hank in that picture is notably anti-climactic.
The '55 version of the film is a vehicle for its stars. Doris Day sings Que sera sera twice and her stentorian vocalizing, which upsets people in the rescue scene in the embassy (we see them puzzled as to why she is singing so loudly) is central to the movie's plot. The marital tensions between Jo and her husband, Jimmy Stewart's character, the midwestern surgeon Ben McKenna, are overt and disturbing. Ben is overbearing and aggressive but his wife, Jo, is apparently a world-famous singer and, when the couple, lands in London, she is greeted by crowds of adoring fans and one fellow calls the surgeon "Mr. Conway" using his wife's maiden name. Jo goads Ben to violence in a scene involving the mysterious Louis Bernard, in this case an agent in French Morocco. When Ben acts, taunted into a rage by Jo, his wife, then, reprimands him. Jo is obviously discontented in her role as handmaiden to Ben and, in a Marrakech restaurant, the couple quarrel so violently that, even, the bad guys, here husband and wife conspirators pretending to be UN workers, are visibly distressed and discomfited. Ben is a prototypical aggressive American who threatens everyone and can't get along with the natives. The film begins when Hank, an annoying miniature Ben, rips off a Muslim woman's veil on a public bus, almost triggering a riot. (Hitchcock famously didn't like children and he makes no effort to create audience sympathy with either Betty, an obnoxious teenager in the '34 version, or Hank, a precocious brat, in the '55 film.) The most notable difference between the two movies is their wildly divergent rhythm. The '34 film is a single accelerated narrative with events following one another in fast succession -- it's like Raider of the Lost Ark, a sort of thrill ride with menacing villains and dangers in every scene. The '55 pictures is far more abstract -- Hitchcock devises the remake as a series of highlighted and distinct set-pieces surrounded by minutes of relatively inert and intentionally dull narrative. The set pieces obviously engage the director's full instincts for suspense and demonstrate his astounding technical proficiency but these are discrete climaxes that stand out from the texture of the rest of the film. The set pieces in the '55 movie are Louis Bernard's killing in the Marrakech street, the assassination attempt at Albert Hall, and the final scenes in the embassy in which Jo sings Que sera sera to induce Hank to whistle an accompaniment that leads Ben upstairs to rescue the child -- there's a final set piece in which Ben with the principle conspirator aiming a gun at Hank descends the palatial steps in the embassy, a reprise of a similar scene in Notorious (1946). These elaborate sequences, comprised of abstract montage, are surrounded by Hitchcock comedy, byplay between minor actors that isn't really very funny and that is obviously just a way for the director to pad the story so as to create more suspense in the set piece climaxes. In Marrakech, there's a lengthy scene that is scatological in tone -- Jimmy Stewart, as the ugly American, has been told not to use his left hand (the hand used to wipe yourself in Arab countries) when eating a chicken cooked with raisins and olives; to the horror of the Arab waiters, he ends up tearing apart a chicken leg with both hands while bitterly quarreling with Jo. In London, a group of sycophants have come to see Jo in the couple's hotel room. We see them sitting around listlessly waiting for something to happen while Jo and Ben are out fighting the terrorists -- these scenes exemplify Hitchcock's esthetic of creating highlights surrounded by little or nothing of interest; the visitors get drunk, lounge around making brittle witticisms, and end up very inebriated and, then, asleep while the movie progresses around them. There's also a fight in a taxidermist's shop that corresponds to the bizarre battle with chairs in the Tabernacle of the Sun in the first picture -- it's played for slapstick laughs. (Of course, we are reminded of the dead animals and taxidermy mounts in the hellish scene in Psycho in which Norman Bates interviews his victim -- this was five years later.) The scenes in Albert Hall in the second movie demonstrate Hitchcock's evolution. In the first film, Jill is in a recognizably realistic space and acts in accord with the environment in which she finds herself. In the remake, Doris Day is obviously nowhere near Albert Hall; in fact, the second film demonstrates Hitchcock's perverse skill at detaching his actors from their locations -- it's clear that Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day aren't in Marrakech or London and, certainly, not in Whitechapel where the church is located (it's called Ambrose Chapel and mistaken for person's name initially) or Albert Hall. It's all done by clever montage and, in fact, is a skillful precursor to the "green screen" effects now prevalent in the movies. Doris Day is shown in medium shot, isolated in a doorway reacting to something; Hitchcock uses complete stillness in most of the shots to contrast with the frenzied motion at the climax of the scene. It's completely stylized, extremely suspenseful, and wholly unnatural -- in the '55 movie, London is a collage of Hollywood back-set alleyways with matte work to depict the steeples and bridges of the city in the background. When Doris Day crosses a street in Whitechapel, we see her from behind in her rather dowdy grey suit and it's obvious that the figure moving through the location isn't the actress whom we will later see in a close-up in a set simulating a tiny portion of Albert Hall. Bernard Hermann, Hitchcock's composer, appears in the surreal scenes in Albert Hall, directing the cantata. The cantata, "Storm Clouds", involves an enormous orchestra with, at least, two hundred singers and a soprano on-stage -- there is an army of musicians and, in the midst of this multitude, the cymbal player who sits motionlessly until the moment he is called upon to act; we see the cymbals sitting next to him, hear the ultra-emotional and bombastic music (it sounds like Richard Strauss but heightened with doses of melodramatic Mahler), but the individual shots show no motion at all, a man with his hands at his side, a harp, a gun poking out from behind a red velvet curtain, Jo standing alone gazing up at the balcony, the musicians in static shots, then, the camera tracking along arpeggios in the score, and, at last and all at once, a flurry of motion as the gun is fired and the assassin plunges to his death from the balcony. By 1955, Hitchcock's esthetic creates a cinema of pure contrast -- for motion to be effective it has to be marooned amidst inaction and motionlessness; for suspense to have its full effect, suspense sequences have to be islands surrounded by vaguely comic scenes or long episodes of intentionally vapid dialogue. Both movies are very effective but they are much different in texture and effect.
