The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

Date Seen: 5/7/17

Score: 4.5/5

DIRECTOR: Alfred Hitchcock

PRODUCER: Alfred Hitchcock

STUDIO: Paramount Pictures 

SCREENPLAY: John Michael Hayes

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Robert Burks

Christopher Olsen and Doris Day

Jimmy Stewart, Daniel Gélan, and Doris Day

Bernard Hermann, Hitchcock's musical supervisor, in his cameo as the conductor at the Royal Albert Hall

Doris Day screams

Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart

I should start by saying that I have not yet seen the 1934 original of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which, strangely enough, was also a Hitchcock film. His 1956 attempt to recreate the story of an American doctor and his family swept into an elaborate murder plot while vacationing in French Morocco is, I can say, as visually dazzling as it is pathologically powerful.

This is not my favorite Hitchcock film- it's not even one of my favorites, really- but there are many things I love about it. First of all, I love Doris Day. Not only is it refreshing to see Jimmy Stewart paired with someone who doesn't look like she could be his daughter, but there's a real chemistry between the two as husband and wife, the lovingly devoted parents of a kidnapped son. Day is an outstanding actress- I honestly don't think she receives enough credit for her abilities- and Stewart does a good job playing a role that's not unfamiliar to him, as a frustrated man whose power is slipping from his control. Together they make a good team and effectively carry the film. I would say that Day is so good playing a loving mother that she creates the illusion of safety and purity under her control, but I know way too much about her real-life son Terry Melcher's Manson family experiences that I think that's naive.

I love the ~exotic~ setting (even though I'm more than a little sure that under every hijab is an ethnocentrically beautiful white woman)- it makes for a great color scheme and also an interesting change. It's fun to listen to characters struggle through French, and, once again, Hitchcock gives us the incompetent police force he's so fond of. I love the plot of this movie, even though I think it's one of those Hitchcock films, along with North by Northwest (1959) where the plot is, as he has termed it, a MacGuffin- the details of the plot are much less important than the themes and the relationship between the characters, and their actions. 

My only real complaint, other then feeling sort of uncomfortable by the exoticism of Northern Africa as being a dangerous and unholy place, is that I got Que Sera, Sera stuck in my head for an ENTIRE WEEK after watching this movie. I guess it could be worse.