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.
The treatment of other countries and cultures in this seems like Hitchcock's hilarious take on the "Ugly American." Some of the best lines include: "Don't you realize that Americans dislike having their children stolen?" and Jimmy Stewart's "Say, what kind of country is this where someone just hides a child in an embassy and you don't just go after them?" (I'm paraphrasing, but Dr. McKenna's grasp on international law/customs seems to be a bit lacking).
The 12 minute orchestra sequence might be - like the shootout at the end of Leone's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," - the moment where the master (Hitchcock) reaches the height of his work in suspense. Its length borders on the absurd, but his skill and the various elements at play keep it thrilling. It's nice to see Bernard Hermann getting obvious onscreen credit for the role he has played in Hitchcock's building of suspense (even if he's conducting someone else's score).
1950s Jimmy Stewart's onscreen romantic partners (Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much, Janet Leigh in The Naked Spur, Grace Kelly in Rear Window, Kim Novak in Vertigo) are an interesting match for the everyman who's entering middle age.
Crew & Cast
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by John Michael Hayes (Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Nevada Smith) with contributions from Angus MacPhail (Spellbound, The Wrong Man, Dead of Night), based on the story by Charles Bennett (Foreign Correspondent) & D.B. Wyndham-Lewis
Cast
James Stewart - Dr. Benjamin McKenna
Doris Day - Jo Conway McKenna
Brenda de Banzie - Lucy Drayton
Bernard Miles - Edward Drayton
Ralph Truman - Inspector Buchanan
Daniel Gelin - Louis Bernard