“My English is not good enough to know,” says the actor Peter Lorre in his second line of dialogue in Hitchcock’s first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It is a moment of self-referential irony, this being the displaced actor’s first English-language film. Lorre, who couldn’t speak a word of English, had to memorise his lines phonetically. The great actor knew too much, but could not yet express the fact in English. A cigarette dangling from his mouth like a lollipop, a deep scar running down his forehead and a dash of white, greasy hair combed down, Lorre appears like some arch-nemesis from a comic strip, but is at the same time perverted and vulnerable (he refers everything to his nurse, a classic Hitchcockian ‘mother figure’).
One of Hitchcock’s archetypal chase thrillers, the film centres around the kidnapping of the daughter of an English family. As her parents venture to save her from the spies responsible, the viewer is taken on a rollercoaster ride of odd and amusing scenes, from Switzerland to Wapping and finally the Royal Albert Hall – all reconstructed at Shepherd’s Bush studios in London. As irrational as these situations are, the narrative always flows irresistibly; every scene seems to have a meaning which, as the film leaps swiftly to the next absurd situation, evaporates before it can be grasped. Hitch takes perverse pleasure in defying any incessant meaning.
Hitchcock remade the film in the US in 1956 but even that refined version couldn’t top his now legendary Albert Hall sequence, where a planned assassination is synchronised to the crash of cymbals during a concert. With its pointed gaze, the ominous relevance of the choir and the intense subjectivity of the shots where Edna Best’s tears blur her vision, this is one of the finest set pieces Hitchcock ever created. As with his other Gaumont British Pictures films, a sense of anxiety due to the political climate in Europe is palpable. The array of German exiles on the set – who aside from Lorre included the cameraman Curt Courant and art director Alfred Junge – was a testimony to that recognition of growing disquiet in the world.

Ehsan Khoshbakht