The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Hugh Wakefield, Frank Vosper, Pierre Fresnay, Cicely Oates, Nova Pilbeam.

Fast, striking suspenser made with verve and that keen British wit; complaints of crude orchestration at a few intervals and highly implausible plotting are meaningless against the face value of pure entertainment. Story centers on the kidnapping of the daughter of a pair of English travelers (Banks, Best) in the Swiss Alps, an assassination attempt, and a strange criminal cult, but the picture rarely pauses to take a breath for explanation. The climactic assassination sequence and subsequent shoot-out are terrific, of course, but don’t sleep on some funny action that preceded it involving sleeping gas and, later, a “furniture fight.” Scene-stealer Lorre, with his sinister yet blandly bemused eccentricities and skunk-like hair stripe, makes for a fantastic heavy—it was his first English-language role, and he had to learn his lines phonetically. Title is taken from a book by G. K. Chesterton, but they have nothing in common (the script is an original). Remade by Hitch himself in 1956.

77/100