After the promised autonomy of the Hollywood film system had lured director Alfred Hitchcock away from Great Britain, he remade The Man Who Knew Too Much, a film he had made in his motherland in 1934. I have not seen the original British version, so I cannot compare the two films, but the later version stands among the paragons of Hitchcock’s style. The film, starring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, contains several elements characteristic of Hitchcock’s work: long takes, well-wrought sets, and a serpentine plot replete with foreigners and false leads.
Cinematographer Robert Burks’s long takes in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) are phenomenal. For example, after the altercation with a Muslim man on the bus in the film’s opening scene, the camera leads us into McKennas’ Moroccan hotel room as Jo and her son Hank sing “Que Sera, Sera.” The camera lens sweeps fluidly through the posh suite and sways over so slightly to the sonorant voices of Doris Day and her on-screen son. This marriage of the auditory and the visual underscores the film’s climactic scene, wherein a cymbal clash is an assassin’s cue to strike. It provides the first bookend of Day’s performance of “Que Sera, Sera”; she performs the song again at the end of the film when the McKennas rescue their son.
As mentioned, the Moroccan hotel suite is gorgeous, like a mirage with modern décor in the middle of the Saharan desert. Sam Comer’s and Arthur Krams’s meticulous set decoration extends beyond this scene and into the next one, a local restaurant adorned with striking patterned tapestries that contrast with its checkered floor. Likewise, the London hotel room is splendidly decorated, which really shows Hitchcock’s eye for detail.
Like most Hitchcock films, the plotline of The Man Who Knew Too Much contains a number of false leads, twists, and unexpected turns. For instance, Jo initially mistrusts Louis Bernard, the Frenchman who befriended the McKennas on the bus. As director, Hitchcock subtly informs the audience that Bernard is not who he says he is, but he provides no further insight into the character until Bernard’s true purpose is revealed on the streets of Marakesh. Stabbed in the back, Bernard staggers toward Ben and tells him of the plot to kill the British dignitary. Bernard is not the only character who turns out to be much different than he at first seems; the Draytons, who attempt to befriend the McKennas at the hotel in Marakesh, turn out to be the film’s villains by first kidnapping Hank and then later harboring the assassin assigned to kill the prime minister.
Standard Hitchcock, The Man Who Knew Too Much is a delight to watch. Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day both give exciting and plausible performances as a doctor and his singer wife jet-setting across the globe. From the cinematography to the set design to the film’s screenplay, there is little to disappoint.