The Man Who Knew Too Much

After a dying man provides them with mysterious information, a vacationing British couple (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) discovers their daughter has been kidnapped.

The Man Who Knew Too Much works because of Peter Lorre. Any thriller is really only as good as it’s chief antagonist and Lorre is riveting here. Though he reportedly spoke so little English at the time of filming that he resorted to learning his line phonetically, Lorre nonetheless manages to infuse every word with a subtle menace that belies his limited understanding of the semantics.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast leaves something to be desired. Nova Pilbeam is a whiney, unsympathetic mess as the kidnapped daughter, and Leslie Banks and Edna Best are a dull and lifeless pair of protagonists who, even combined, fail to muster so much as a fraction of Lorre’s screen presence, and, given the script’s paper-thin characterizations, presence is everything.

Director Alfred Hitchcock tries to compensate for his weak leads by propelling the plot along at a breakneck speed, wrapping the whole story up in a very neat 75 minutes. While this does keep things from dragging, it can’t overcome Banks and Best’s fundamental lack of charisma. This is a film full of great moments, such as the memorable dentist scene, or the classic Royal Albert Hall sequence, that never quite gels due to a fundamental disconnect from the protagonists.

Hitchcock, perhaps sensing a missed opportunity, would remake this film 22 years later with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day in the lead roles, but, unfortunately, that film has it’s own set of problems.