The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) on Netflix
Bob and Jill Lawrence vacation in Switzerland with their daughter Betty. A fellow guest points Jill to a note about a planned crime, and criminals seize Betty to keep her parents silent.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Bob and Jill Lawrence take their daughter Betty to a hotel in Switzerland, where they befriend a Frenchman, Louis Bernard. Jill enters a clay pigeon shooting contest; a chiming watch distracts her at the decisive moment and she loses to Ramon Levine, a rival sharpshooter. That evening, while Jill dances with Louis, he is shot. Wounded, he tells her where to find a note meant for the British consul, and she passes the instruction on to Bob. The note warns of a crime being planned. The group responsible for the shooting then takes Betty and warns her parents to say nothing about what they know. With the police out of reach, Bob and Jill travel back to England.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- C.M. Woolf, who controlled the cinema in England at the time, hated the film and told Michael Balcon that his company, General Film Distributors, would not release it unless it was remade with a new director, different cast and writers. Hitchcock appealed to Gaumont-British owner Isidore Ostrer, who persuaded Woolf to release it.
- It was Peter Lorre's second English-language film, after the multiple-language version of M (1931), but he still could not speak English, having only recently fled Nazi Germany, and he learned his lines phonetically.
- The climactic shoot-out was based on the Sidney Street Siege, a real incident in London's East End, where Hitchcock grew up, on 3 January 1911. The shoot-out was left out of Hitchcock's 1956 remake.
- The film began when Hitchcock and writer Charles Bennett tried to adapt a Bulldog Drummond story about international conspiracies and the kidnapping of a baby, first titled Bulldog Drummond's Baby. When the deal fell through they reused the plot frame, taking the title from an unrelated G. K. Chesterton compilation.
- Norway banned the film in January 1935, giving no reason beyond a statement that it was not approved for public viewing in the country.
- Hitchcock hired Australian composer Arthur Benjamin to write a piece of music especially for the set piece at the Royal Albert Hall. Known as the Storm Clouds Cantata, it is used in both the 1934 version and the 1956 remake.
