Movie Review: The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre

(Note: This is my submission in the Fabulous Films of the 30s Blogathon, Hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association.)

Happily married Bob and Jill Lawrence (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) are on a winter holiday at a European ski resort with their young daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam). While there, they laugh and dance and intermingle with all kinds of interesting new people, from the suave Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay) to the strange, funny Mr. Abbott (Peter Lorre). But their vacation suddenly turns into a living nightmare one night when Louis falls to the ground, shot by an unseen enemy. It turns out that Louis Bernard was in fact a government agent and before he dies, he passes on a vital secret to the Lawrences. The secret is an imminent assassination in London, one that threatens to start a second world war. But before the couple can act on the information, the assassins, led by the ever-smiling Abbott, kidnap young Betty. This forces the couple to keep their mouths shut, even as the danger draws closer. However, they refuse to give up and instead, choose to search for Betty on their own. Bob and his trusty brother-in-law Clive (Hugh Wakefield) take to the back alleys of England, hunting down leads that range from the weird to the truly bizarre. Still, Abbott is onto them and so are the rest of the assassins. The family will have to find the strength and courage to save Betty and somehow do it without betraying their own country. It's a battle of wits and wills and there's no telling what could happen...

For someone who likes to introduce herself as an Alfred Hitchcock super-fan, to the point that I wrote my college admissions essay on him, it's taken me an amazingly long time to catch up with this film. It's strange, but while the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much was ridiculously easy for me to catch on TV during the periodic Hitchcock marathons, its older (and thoroughly British) sibling from 1934 has been elusive. The experience of finally seeing the original film however, gave me a renewed understanding for why both movies are so inextricably paired together in critical discussion. Comparing them is irresistible but deciding between them is very difficult. The two films are such a perfect encapsulation of their respective decades and countries, with all the attending strengths and weaknesses, that preferring one to the other seems to be less of an aesthetic judgment and more like an epicurean deciding which tickles his palate. They're equally delicious.

Both films tell the tale of a more-or-less ordinary married couple who stumble into a dangerous world of espionage and assassins. Despite their naivete and seeming helplessness, the couple find new reserves of strength and determination when their own child is kidnapped to keep their mouths shut about an impending assassination.
 
In the 1934 film, the Lawrences are a sophisticated English couple vacationing at a Swiss ski resort with a young daughter. The husband is well-off and contented; the wife is flirtatious and happens to be a crack shot. In the 1956 film, the McKennas are a cheerful but sometimes hapless American couple traveling through Morocco with a freckle-faced son. The husband is a blunt, guy-next-door doctor who doesn't quite fit into his foreign surroundings any more than his long legs fit under Moroccan tables. His wife is a famous singer who gave up her career for the sake of her marriage. In both films, it's the husband that takes the active role in searching and fighting while it's up to the wife to use her great talent (sharpshooting and singing, respectively) to save the day. And in both films, it's the couple's very unassuming ordinariness that causes the ruthless villains to fatally underestimate them.
 
The great dividing line between the 1934 film and the 1956 remake is the tone. In the brightly colored and much more expansive remake, Hitchcock gives us a fresh-faced American couple, so complacent that they can crack morbid jokes over the various patients whose ailments funded their vacation ("You know what's paying for this three days in Marrakesh--Mrs. Campbell's gall stone"). He then proceeds to torment them 'til they crack. The fact that all of this is happening to James Stewart and Doris Day, two beloved Hollywood superstars, puts the frantic emotions of the couple front and center. All of this even while Hitchcock dazzles the eye with exotic settings and amazing set pieces. Everything is so immense that even Stewart and Day can unravel without anyone noticing. The 1956 movie sort of takes the  rotten-apple-core mentality of Shadow of a Doubt, in which another innocent American goes up against ruthless villainy and pairs it to the giddy visuals of something like To Catch a Thief.

The 1934 film on the other hand, is like the speedy little roadster next to the 1956 cruise ship. It's a much compacter version of the same tale, clocking in at a mere 75 minutes. It also is much sharper in the twists and turns of its moods, careening from lightweight comedy to tense thriller and back again. It doesn't linger nearly as much on the parents. To a large extent, Leslie Banks and Edna Best are just there to keep the story moving along. They keep the stereotypical stiff upper lip to the point that even when Banks reunites with his daughter, in the middle of a group of assassins, he tries to make light of the entire situation. The one government representative we meet is coolly annoyed with the couple's secretiveness, barking at them to put their country first. And in the end, the film's most memorable character is not the couple nor any of their friends. It's the villain. 

For all those who like to harp on Hitchcock's onscreen infatuation with his blonde leading ladies, I say that Hitchcock was just as enamored (in a cinematic way) with his villains. Peter Lorre, playing the kidnapping assassin Abbott, sets a template for the charming villain that Hitchcock would repeat again and again with actors like James Mason, Ray Milland and Robert Walker. 

The story goes that Peter Lorre had to learn his lines phonetically in order to play the mysterious Abbott. Not that anybody cared because, after his indelible performance in M, they were eager to get him. Lorre's acting here is really a marvel of assurance; it's a complete 180 degree turn from his cringing, desperate performance in M. Abbott is smooth and confident, with one of the most beautifully beaming smiles you could ever hope to see. When you put him up against the bluff, so-very British Leslie Banks, Lorre almost looks like the mischievous schoolboy tweaking the nose of the headmaster. He's the guy who tosses in a Shakespeare quote as a threat ("A long, long journey 'from which no traveler returns'") and then caps it off with the deadpan aside, "Great poet." 

And yet, I think the key to Lorre's brilliance in the role is his unpredictability. Just when you think you've gotten used to Lorre as the impeccably polite villain, he turns the tables and gives you moments of sadistic menace or even, in a startling scene, genuine grief. When his creepy female accomplice dies in a shootout, Lorre holds her and looks, for a moment, like a brother holding the body of his sister. And then the moment's gone. We never learn what they were to each other. We never really understand Abbott, who smiles innocently in moments where he should threaten and looks angry in moments when everything's going his way. But Lorre is so good in the role that he eclipses everyone else. Because of him, the film ends up less as a tale of two ordinary people up against evil and instead, becomes a briskly unsentimental film which sets up scenes and knocks them over like dominoes. This is pure suspense, with no more character development than absolutely necessary.

In comparing the 1934 film and the 1956 remake, it's quite striking to see how the role of the wife evolved over the course of two decades. In the first film, Edna Best carries on in the tradition of the sprightly, sophisticated wives of '30s films. There's something a little Nora Charles-ish about her in the way she sails through rooms, cheerfully flirts with other men (in the full confidence that her husband is watching and smirking) and shoots down clay pigeons with cool panache. 

However, once her child is kidnapped, Best is pushed to the side of the story. Her own grief at the loss of her child is relegated to one scene, in which Best staggering with the news of the kidnapping, turns glassy-eyed and spins into a faint, while Hitchcock briefly cuts to a whirling POV shot. From there, her husband's off to do the work of tracking down their child, with the brother-in-law along as the trusty sidekick. Best is benched for a good chunk of the movie from then on; she reappears for the famous Albert Hall sequence and then for a final shootout with the assassins. It's in those final moments that Best seizes her own action-hero moment, grabbing a rifle and delivering the shot that will save her daughter. Even if you could see it coming (Why else establish the wife as a crack shot?), it still comes off as an exhilarating bit of physical heroism, all the more so because none of the characters treat it as anything odd.

The 1956 film, by contrast, knows it's got Doris Day and a star gets a star part. Day's emotions are given much more depth and attention than Best's. The British film treats Best's motherly anguish as so much inconvenient baggage, with the government man basically snapping at her and husband for being so unpatriotic as to, you know, care more about the life of their child than the life of a statesman. The 1956 film by contrast has a prolonged, deeply uncomfortable scene of James Stewart drugging Day to calm her; the chin-up-old-girl spirit of the original has turned into cruelty. Day's torment during the Albert Hall concert scene is also drawn out much more than Best's. In addition to being a more openly emotional character, Day's housewife is a famous singer whose ambitions have been subtly snuffed out in favor of marriage. The irony is that, despite the fact that she seems, on the surface, like a much more retrograde archetype than the earlier Best character, Day does in fact use that same powerful voice to save both her child and the statesman. She's so much more repressed than Best's action hero and yet, because her film pays more attention to her, she comes off as much more heroic.

Now that I've finally crossed the 1934 film off my list, I can say with confidence that it's a sparkling, smart movie in its own right. It's the work of a young filmmaker just discovering the full range of what he can do and the mesmerizing shifts of tone, the charismatic villain, and the quirky bursts of humor all come together perfectly. Really, when I think about it, the experience of watching both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much is like visiting their respective locations. The 1956 film is a trip through a dazzlingly colorful, overcrowded marketplace. The 1934 original is like a trip down a snow-covered mountain. Cool, exhilarating and all over in a rush.

Favorite Quote:

"You know, to a man with a heart as soft as mine, there's nothing sweeter than a touching scene. Such as a father saying goodbye to his child. Yeah, goodbye for the last time. What could be more touching than that?"

Favorite Scene:

The scene in which Edna Best is dancing with the spy. Her husband, playfully pretending to be jealous, takes her knitting and turns it into a unraveling bit of thread that quickly entangles her and her dancing partner. It's all light and romantic. And then in one of those perfect bits of Hitchcock turning on a dime, her partner falls down, mortally wounded, and the light thread that entwined them together has suddenly become a trap. It's really the ultimate metaphor for the Hitchcock movie. 

Final Six Words:

A champagne bubble balanced on knives

Movie Review: The Collector

The Collector (1965)

directed by William Wyler, starring Terence Stamp, Samantha Eggar

(Note: This is my entry for the The Best Hitchcock Movies (That Hitchcock Never Made) Blogathon, hosted by Dorian from Tales of the Easily Distracted and Becky from ClassicBecky's Brain Food)

This is the tale of Miranda Grey, the art student, (Samantha Eggar) and Freddie Clegg (Terence Stamp), the butterfly collector. She's beautiful, ambitious, and naive. Freddie is shy, poor, and utterly obsessed with her. When Freddie wins a fortune in the football pools, he devises the perfect use for his newfound wealth. He buys a remote house and converts the basement into a comfortable prison for Miranda. He furnishes it with everything she could possibly want: art supplies, books, clothes, and cosmetics. Surely if he brings her here and keeps her for awhile, she will learn to love him. Freddie follows through by chloroforming Miranda and dragging her to the basement. When Miranda wakes she discovers, not a brave new world, but a strange, servile man. He apologizes for the use of force, promises to respect her boundaries, but refuses to let her go. Baffled and angry, Miranda soon realizes that escape won't be easy. She strikes a bargain with Freddie, promising to stay a month. At the end of a month, he must let her go. Freddie agrees, confident that she will soon love him. But Miranda's imprisonment will end up changing them both, in strange and brutal ways.

The Collector, based on John Fowles' novel, came to the screen in 1965, during the last years of the studio era. Standards had started to loosen up though, and this darkly twisted tale, which surely would have given Mayer or Goldwyn heart palpitations, was kept faithful to the book, right up to the diabolical ending. William Wyler turned down The Sound of Music to make this film, intrigued by the subject matter. It was really the first proper suspense thriller he'd ever done.

Comparing this film to Wyler's others give it an interest factor beyond the original story. Wyler had tackled dark obsession and villainy before (The Letter, The Little Foxes) but this was more visceral and explicitly sexual. Now, the distinctive mood in a Wyler film is compassion, but at a distance. He will bring you close to characters and then let the camera stand back, as we helplessly watch them suffer, love, self-destruct, or redeem themselves. Wyler invites sympathy for these people and yet there's a conscious restraint, as if he's allowing us to only see so much. So you take that Wyler quality and then look at The Collector. For example, in a scene where Miranda and Freddie struggle in the rain, Wyler holds the camera back from them, letting us see their fight as if from far away, as if we were witnesses to a crime. Then the camera goes down low and we see the tactile reality of the fight, their bodies slipping on the wet grass, the blood mixing in with the rain. The camera is at that same low angle when they return to the basement, Miranda's body flung brutally on the floor. The two gasp for breath, exhausted from the effort and because we are kept so close to them, we can feel it as if we were part of it. Anyone who wants to accuse Wyler of being staid should take a look at that moment again.

When I think about a word to describe Terence Stamp, the first one that always comes to mind is "presence." The man just has remarkable confidence onscreen and he had it right from the beginning. Billy Budd was his screen debut. Stamp took the role of a young man whose sensual beauty and angelic goodness is enough to drive men to destruction and tragedy. And he portrayed it so completely that I can't imagine any other actor in the part.  

The Collector was his third film and it's almost a photo-negative reversal of Billy Budd. Instead of a pure-hearted Christ figure, he's a cold, kidnapping psychopath. Instead of being the object of desire, he's a prudish, probably-impotent loner who obsesses over a woman he can't have. Where Billy is the innocent center in a chaotic world, Freddie is that chaos unleashed. That Stamp was able to take two such disparate roles at the beginning of his career and inhabit them, with no self-consciousness, is amazing. Try as I might, I never catch the man trying to protect himself. As Billy, the otherworldly ideal, Stamp offers himself up for the camera's gaze in a way that makes the villain's obsession with him clear. But for the role of Freddie, Stamp closes himself up, shutting out any hint of charm, slyness, or campy appeal. It's as deliberately uncharismatic a villain as you can get.

In the annals of cinematic psychopaths, you'd think Freddie Clegg would have a thriving fanbase. I mean, he's lonely, despised, romantic, and kidnaps a woman to make her love him. Surely, the fans who obsess over the Phantom of the Opera and Frollo would adore this guy. But nope, in spite of a few Youtube videos. While that can partly be attributed to the relative obscurity of this film, I think it has a lot to do with Stamp's performance. He's awkward onscreen, in a way that evokes discomfort rather than sympathy. He wears his suits like the coat hanger was still inside. His gaze is flat, even when professing love. We've all met people who gave off that same unnerving dissonance. These are the people we move away from on the subway, the people we look away from even if we don't know why. Stamp's performance gives the film that extra shudder of plausibility.

Now prior to this film, the only Samantha Eggar film I knew was Doctor Dolittle, in which she's about as obligatory a female character as you can get. In the scenes where Eggar has to regard Rex Harrison with romantic yearning, Eggar mostly looks puzzled or irritated by turn (which, knowing what an utter debacle the making of that film was, you can hardly blame her). But in The Collector, Eggar is wonderful, taking the naive but resourceful Miranda and making her someone to root for. She's so innocently pretentious at times that you cringe for her (for example, telling Freddie that his obsession is "the kind of dream young boys have once they hit puberty"), but underneath it, you can see a woman fighting tooth and nail to keep her sense of self. When Eggar crumples to the ground at one point, sobbing, "Let me be free," your heart truly aches for her. Actually, considering all that Eggar has to undergo in this film, from nude shots to violent struggles with Stamp, I did wonder if Cronenberg saw The Collector and thought, "Now how could I torture this woman more?"

The worst flaw in The Collector is Maurice Jarre's harpsichord-driven, aggressively-quirky score. Now, readers of my blog might point out that I just finished trashing the music in Wyler's Friendly Persuasion. But that film's music was just sentimental. The Collector score on the other hand, is downright horrible, knocking the mood askew in nearly every scene. It's tinkly, dischordant, and whimsical. Inviting whimsy into your tale of dark romantic obsession is like inviting Christopher Walken into Ophelia's mad scene. I was happy to find out that the author John Fowles was on my side about the music, saying, "Surely silence would be better."

Now, when I listed The Collector among my "fascination films," I also put Hitchock's Marnie on that list. And when you think of it, these two films are close cinematic cousins. Released with a year of each other, they both tell the story of men who wish to posses women, whatever the cost. When Sean Connery mockingly talks about his interest in taming wildlife to Tippi Hedren, it's hard not to think of Terence Stamp showing his butterfly collection to Samantha Eggar, saying, "What difference does one specimen make to a whole species?" But where Marnie was lurid, messy, and deeply personal, The Collector is polished, cool, and cerebral. While certain scenes in The Collector feel like they could have come straight out of the Hitchcock playbook (for example, a moment where Miranda tries to alert an oblivious neighbor by overflowing the bathtub), the overall mood is entirely different. Wyler's matter-of-fact approach to The Collector is both a strength and a weakness. It makes the film consistently uncomfortable to watch; Wyler refuses to make moral judgments or tell us what to think. But at the same time, while The Collector has ample chills and surprises, it's never obsessive or romantic in the way that Marnie was.

And yet I keep coming back to The Collector. Its characters, its direction, its strange, steady-handed storytelling. And the look in Terence Stamp's eyes when his last vestige of sanity snaps and he tells Miranda, "I can do what I like!"

Favorite Quote:

"Marry me. Please marry me. I don't expect anything. I don't expect you to do anything you don't want. You can do what you like...study art...I won't ask anything. Anything of you. Except you live in the same house and be my wife in name. You can have your own bedroom. You can lock it every night."

Favorite Scene:

For me, the film crystallizes in a single perfect scene where Miranda and Freddie discuss The Catcher in the Rye. Freddie's frustration with Miranda and her "la-dee-da" ways has begun to boil over. Angry at what he considers her class superiority, he insists on reading her favorite book and finding out why she thinks it special. When he returns, he tells her flatly that he didn't see much point in it. Miranda tries haltingly to explain, describing her love for Holden Caulfield's character. "The boy, he's so aware...the way he hates everything that's false." Freddie responds, "He sounds a mess to me." The tension builds unbearably as Freddie grows angrier and the increasingly terrified Miranda blunders on. Finally, frustrated with Freddie's determined incomprehension of the book, she snaps, "You don't understand, you're not trying to see how much like... like all of us he is." Freddie immediately knows the meaning of her stumble and says icily, "Like me? That's what you meant, isn't it?" And he's right. 

It's a brilliant moment that turns over our expectations as well as Miranda's. Because we might have believed, as Miranda does, that this awkward loner will gravitate to Holden Caulfield, but when Freddie turns the tables on her, it makes perfect sense. Of course this man, with his suits and class consciousness and "proper respect" would think that Caulfield was a spoiled whiner. On top of that, the scene just works perfectly as the moment in which we can see Freddie finally tipping over the edge into murderous rage, as Miranda tries frantically to say or do the right thing. But there is no right thing. She's alone with a madman. And this time, he's got her pegged.

Final Six Words:

Cold and clammy tale of obsession