There are international conspiracies, globetrotting locations, and some of the most suspenseful sequences ever created, but can we talk about the woman in trouble? Superficially, The Man Who Knew Too Much is a thriller that follows everyman Dr. Benjamin McKenna (James Stewart) and his wife Jo Conway McKenna (Doris Day) as they try to retrieve their kidnapped son from assassins. Underlying this exciting Hitchcock plot is the upsetting (also quintessentially Hitchcockian) sense that there is something terribly wrong with these characters. As the film progressed, I began to feel as though I was not watching a normal thriller but rather the stress dream of a 1950s housewife.
The dreamlike nature of the film - while less explicit than Vertigo - is principally experienced through the frustrating actions of the principal characters. They wait until perhaps the most inopportune time to inform the police of the assassination plot, Dr. McKenna waits until after a crowd has dispersed to attempt to corner the kidnappers, and the assassins decide that the best place to effectively kill another leader is during an orchestral performance. The characters in this dream are totally convinced that the decisions they make and the path they follow are completely logical, but the wide-awake audience can notice the impossible or illogical plot points. The vibrant technicolor and Hitchcock's expertly-composed frames also suggest the film takes place in a more dramatic and stylized version of our reality.