Alfred Hitchcock (1956)
The first half hour is crisp and inviting as it introduces the main characters and develops the peculiar situation they soon find themselves in. The McKennas, who live in Indianapolis, are travelling in Morocco. The father Ben (James Stewart) is a doctor, his wife Jo (Doris Day) a former singing star who retired from the stage to bring up their young son Hank (Christopher Olsen). On a coach journey to Marrakesh, the family meet a Frenchman called Louis Bernard (Daniel Gélin ). He’s initially helpful but, in Jo’s mind anyway, increasingly suspicious. As the McKennas arrive at their Marrakesh hotel, a middle-aged couple (Bernard Miles and Brenda de Banzie) are coming out and the wife gives the McKennas an odd look (which turns out to be a giveaway). Ben and Jo dine with this British couple, the Draytons, after Bernard has suddenly reneged on his invitation to take them to dinner. The McKennas are baffled and angry when he then enters the restaurant with another woman. This whole sequence is really good. The conversation with the Draytons, who show the Americans how to eat food according to local custom, is surprisingly naturalistic yet still has an edge. James Stewart reminds you of his easy comic flair as he repeatedly tries to arrange his long legs under a low table. (This is the bit that Sally particularly enjoyed as a kid, on a rare family visit to the cinema, when the film was first released.) By lunchtime next day, Louis Bernard has been stabbed to death; with his dying breath, he tells Ben McKenna that a foreign statesman is going to be assassinated in London any day and that the British authorities must be warned. Shortly afterwards, Hank is kidnapped by the duplicitous Draytons, who turn out to be part of the assassination plot.
Once Ben and Jo take a plane to London, the plot doesn’t so much thicken as congeal, the pace of The Man Who Knew Too Much slackens, and the people in the story matter less as individuals. It’s something of a relief when the Draytons are revealed to be baddies: until they are, the taken-as-read superiority of the American and British characters and some of their remarks about French, North African and Muslim ways of life give the movie a racist streak. It’s never clear why a home counties-ish couple like the Draytons are mixed up in this attempted coup but the script by John Michael Hayes (based on a story by Charles Bennett) is generally vague about the politics and geography of the story. Who Louis Bernard and the Draytons are spying for matters less than that they’re spying for someone. The statesman whose life is threatened turns out to be the prime minister of an unnamed European country: his and his compatriots’ evening dress and thick accents suggest Ruritania. Much more of a problem is Hitchcock’s lack of interest in exploring the possible tension between what compels the McKennas as parents and what they seem to see as a moral imperative to thwart the assassination plot. Getting their young son back must be more important to them than the survival of an unknown politician but their twin objectives to find Hank and save the prime minister induce in Ben and Jo an undifferentiated anxiety. This culminates in the countdown to the moment that a gun is fired during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the score for the film, conducts the on-screen orchestra and Hitchcock is evidently enjoying his own orchestration here but the sequence goes on too long – probably because we’ve already seen much of it as an accompaniment to the opening credits (where it works well). As the orchestra gets closer and closer to the clash of cymbals that’s the assassin’s cue, Doris Day gets increasingly tearful but her emotion didn’t make much sense to me. You get the impression here of an actress not being sure what to do and the director not caring what she does as long as she acts.
As well as acting (pretty well, much of the time), Doris Day also sings. Hitchcock, who had already made this story in 1934, told Truffaut that the earlier version was ‘ the work of a talented amateur’ whereas his second attempt was ‘made by a professional’. Nevertheless, the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much is probably best known for the Oscar-winning song ‘Que Sera, Sera’, by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans . This is performed twice: first, without musical accompaniment and as a duet between Jo and Hank, as he’s getting ready for bed as his parents prepare to go out to the restaurant. It’s Jo’s scream just as the cymbals clash at the Albert Hall that causes the gunman to miss his target: the bullet does no more than graze the prime minister’s arm. In gratitude for Jo’s lifesaving intervention, he invites her and Ben to his country’s embassy, where the treacherous ambassador was expecting by this point to be celebrating a coup d’état and where Hank is supervised by Mrs Drayon in a locked upstairs room. Jo entertains the embassy party with songs at the piano, chiefly a marathon reprise of ‘Que Sera, Sera’, sung as loudly as possible to reach Hank’s ears. It’s a pity that Doris Day is required to belt the number out for purposes of the plot but at least she had a major hit with the song, on both sides of the Atlantic, once filming was over.
24 August 2012
