{"id":21930,"date":"2013-02-14T10:03:51","date_gmt":"2013-02-14T16:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=21930"},"modified":"2020-09-16T09:08:53","modified_gmt":"2020-09-16T14:08:53","slug":"sir-alfred-simply-must-have-his-set-pieces-the-man-who-knew-too-much-1934","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2013\/02\/14\/sir-alfred-simply-must-have-his-set-pieces-the-man-who-knew-too-much-1934\/","title":{"rendered":"Sir Alfred simply must have his set pieces: THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/strong> (1934).<\/em><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

Hitchcock made six remarkable thrillers from 1934 through 1938, and I have long believed that the first one was the best. I think very well of Sabotage<\/em>, and both The Lady Vanishes<\/em> and The 39 Steps<\/em> are strong contenders. But for me, The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em> has got damn near everything going for it.<\/p>\n

I came to it a little late. It wasn\u2019t the first Hitchcock I wrote about; that was Notorious<\/em>, in a 1969 piece that nakedly reveals the limitations of a college senior’s knowledge. Nor was it the first Hitchcock I saw; that was Vertigo<\/em>, when I was about ten. Inauspiciously for me, when Vertigo<\/em> was revived for national television broadcast in 1972, I was flying to a job interview in Madison, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n

I got that job, though, and soon The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em> became very important for me. Seeing it at a film society screening, I was bowled over. Then I discovered that it was available for purchase in a cheap 16mm print. I bought a print and began teaching the film as a model of narrative construction. It worked its way into the first edition of Film Art<\/em>, in 1979 and hung around there for several editions.<\/p>\n

That sample analysis has been available as a pdf on our site<\/a>, but check it out at the Criterion site<\/a>, where it’s enhanced with nice frame enlargements and a major extract. The essay makes my case for the movie as an extremely well-constructed piece in the classical storytelling tradition.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>So I was the ideal consumer for a spruced-up DVD\/ Blu-ray release<\/a>, and as usual Criterion doesn\u2019t disappoint.\u00a0 It\u2019s a handsome version, with some fine supplements. We get two rare interviews with Sir Alfred from CBS\u2019s arts program Camera Three <\/em>(featuring Pia Lindstrom and William K. Everson) and a perceptive discussion with Guillermo del Toro, who makes a vigorous case for the film. So does Philip Kemp in his commentary, which is strong on production background. Kemp offers valuable information on script versions and on Hitchcock\u2019s niche in the English industry. The accompanying booklet includes a lively appreciation by The Self-Styled Siren<\/a>, aka Farran Smith Nehme.<\/p>\n

Interest in Hitchcock seems to be the one constant in the whirligig of tastes in film culture. He is a mainstay of home video and cable television; apparently the films can be re-released in perpetuity. Professors love to teach his films. The techniques are obvious and vivid, and the films offer a manageable complexity that encourages interpretation. Class, gender, power, the law\u2014whatever your favorite themes, they\u2019re all on the surface, yet enticingly ambivalent. Not to mention how much fun these movies are to watch. I\u2019ve always enjoyed introducing \u201clesser Hitchcock\u201d like Stage Fright<\/em> and Dial M for Murder<\/em> and then watching the audience fall under their spell.<\/p>\n

Critics navigate by Hitchcock as a fixed pole star. Reviewers compare every new thriller to the classics of The Master of Suspense. Just look at what people write<\/a> about Soderbergh\u2019s Side Effects<\/em>. And for those who promoted the auteur approach to Hollywood cinema, Hitchcock was a beachhead. Who could doubt that this man turned out personal projects within the impersonal machine known as Hollywood? And if he could do it, why not Ford, Hawks, Sternberg, Ray, and all the rest? Hitchcock nudged skeptics down the slippery slope toward auteurism.<\/p>\n

Even if Hitchcock isn\u2019t to your taste, you can\u2019t avoid his influence. That became obvious around the 1970s, when directors began borrowing from him more or less overtly: Spielberg\u2019s Vertigo<\/em> track-and-zoom in Jaws<\/em> (now itself a convention), De Palma\u2019s homages\/pastiches, Polanski\u2019s use of point-of-view in Repulsion<\/em> and Rosemary\u2019s Baby<\/em>, the endless Psycho<\/em> sequels and the van Sant remake, and the rest. But Hitch was no less influential in his own day; I\u2019d argue that filmmakers of the 1940s had to raise their game if they wanted to meet the challenge of Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt,<\/em> Spellbound<\/em>, and Notorious<\/em>. Billy Wilder told a reporter that\u00a0Double Indemnity\u00a0<\/em>was his effort to \u201cout-Hitch Hitch.\u201d<\/p>\n

What was so special? Obviously, the throwaway humor\u2014sometimes airy, sometimes slapstick, sometimes sardonic. And obviously a gift for switching situations around, playing them against clich\u00e9, setting us up for a jolt. But I think there\u2019s something else afoot. Part of the Master\u2019s repute rests on virtuosity of film technique. Hitchcock makes movie<\/em> movies, even when, like Rope<\/em> or Dial M<\/em>, they seem \u201ctheatrical.\u201d And this movieness is best seen, I think, by considering a term that always comes up with Lord Alfred: the set piece.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maintaining a tradition<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hitchcock held onto the flamboyant expressive devices of silent and early sound cinema far longer than any other director. For decades he kept alive techniques that many directors thought were old hat: abrupt cuts to details of gestures and objects; blurry point-of-view images to suggest distraught or befuddled states of mind (as above); very brief insert shots to accentuate violence. Compare Battleship Potemkin<\/em> with Foreign Correspondent<\/em>\u2019s assassination scene.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hitchcock built entire films around classic silent techniques. The Kuleshov effect governs Rear Window<\/em>; the German \u201centfesselte<\/em>\u201d or \u201cunchained\u201d camera dominates Rope<\/em> and Under Capricorn<\/em>. Rope<\/em> and Dial M<\/em><\/a> revive the aesthetics of the German kammerspielfilm<\/em>, or \u201cchamber play.\u201d The Germanic look was alive and well in the spiderweb shadow-work of Suspicion<\/em>, while both French Impressionism and German Expressionism inform the dream sequences of Spellbound<\/em> and Vertigo<\/em>. He also preserved the \u201ccreative use of sound\u201d that was the hallmark of directors like Clair and Milestone. While others had pretty much given up the expressionistic use of music and effects, Hitchcock was always ready to draw on them. The hallucinatory Merry Widow Waltz haunts Shadow of a Doubt<\/em>, while Hitchcock\u2019s penchant for giving us two pieces of information simultaneously, one in the image and another on the soundtrack, let him design scenes visually and push a lot of dialogue offscreen.<\/p>\n

This flexibility of technique modulates from scene to scene. In The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em>, note-reading is presented in three ways, in rapid succession. First, Bob finds Louis\u2019 note in the hairbrush.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Soon Bob gets a message from the front desk. What does it say? Hitchcock hides that by, for once, not supplying subjective point of view.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Only when the note is passed to Jill do we get to see it, but with a twist. Nobody but Hitchcock would add an extra shot that cuts to the note in her hand without<\/em> revealing what it says.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That extra shot is what Eisenstein called a primer; as with dynamite, you need a little charge to trigger the blast.<\/p>\n

We often forget that classic silent directors used their pictorial techniques for suspense. Lang\u2019s Mabuse<\/em> films and Spione<\/em> furnish plenty of instances, but so do the Soviet montage films. The scene in which the police wait for the worker to return to his wife in The End of St. Petersburg<\/em> now looks like pure Hitchcock, and of course the Odessa Steps sequence was the Psycho<\/em> shower of its day. So it isn\u2019t surprising that Hitchcock would turn his silent-film virtuosity toward creating scenes of high tension and threatened violence. Nor is it surprising that his skills would crystallize in \u201cset pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everybody talks about Hitchcock\u2019s fondness for set pieces. It\u2019s part of his brand. We have the Statue of Liberty climax in Saboteur<\/em>, the milk carried up the staircase in Suspicion<\/em>, the milk-and-razor scene and the final suicide in Spellbound<\/em>, the spectacular rescue of Alicia at the end of Notorious<\/em>, and the efforts of Bruno to retrieve the lighter in Strangers on a Train<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But, come to think of it, what makes something a set piece?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Game, set piece, match<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Foreign Correspondent<\/strong> (1940).<\/em><\/p>\n

As commonly understood in the arts, a set piece is a fairly self-contained portion of a larger work. It has a distinct beginning and end, and it’s understandable and impressive if extracted from its original. It\u2019s designed to be a bravura display of concentrated virtuosity. In music, an example would be an operatic aria like the Queen of the Night\u2019s in The Magic Flute<\/em>: it is so flashy and complete in itself that it can enjoyed on its own, in a concert setting.<\/p>\n

Two early uses of the term shed light on its implications. In stage parlance, a \u201cset piece\u201d is an item of the set that can stand alone, like a gate or fake tree. In pyrotechnics, a \u201cset piece\u201d is a carefully patterned arrangement of fireworks; here again, it implies a display that dazzles the audience.<\/p>\n

In the silent era, I\u2019d suggest, the clearest exponent of set pieces is Eisenstein, who became known as \u201cthe master of the episode.\u201d Many of his big scenes, like the Odessa Steps massacre, are developed at such length that they function as mini-films. But you can consider passages in Chaplin and Keaton as set pieces\u2014the dance of the breadrolls in The Gold Rush<\/em> perhaps, or the windstorm in Steambout Bill, Jr<\/em>. The musical would seem to be a natural home of the set piece, with numbers standing out against more mundane scenes. In modern cinema, again under the aegis of Hitchcock: De Palma offers plenty, and perhaps the prize fights in Raging Bull<\/em> constitute a string of them. Today the home of the set piece is the action picture; the chases and fights are the main attraction, and the genre challenges directors and crew to find new ways to intoxicate us.<\/p>\n

The aesthetic of the set piece implies that some scenes function as filler while others get the whipped-up treatment. If that\u2019s right, many great directors don\u2019t favor mounting set pieces. Ozu, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, Hawks, and others present what we might call \u201cthrough-composed\u201d films. Just as Wagnerian opera and its successors minimized set pieces, these filmmakers create a surface texture that doesn\u2019t create self-contained high points. (I grant you that the immolation of Herlofs Marthe in Dreyer\u2019s Day of Wrath<\/em> might count.)<\/p>\n

Given the detachable quality of set pieces, it\u2019s true that some of Hitchcock\u2019s can seem implausible or gratuitous. How essential is Guy\u2019s lighter to any plausible scheme of Bruno\u2019s? \u00a0If you want to kill Roger Thornhill, why send him to a crossroads in Midwest corn country? (A knife in the back on the Greyhound is more reliable.) It was this tendency to sacrifice story logic for stunning anthology bits that Raymond Chandler deplored:<\/p>\n

The thing that amuses me about Hitchcock is the way he directs a film in his head before he knows what the story is. You find yourself trying to rationalize the shots he wants to make rather than the story. Every time you get set he jabs you off balance by wanting to do a love scene on top of the Jefferson Memorial or something like that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chandler has a point. How do you integrate a set piece into a whole movie? (I\u2019ll make some suggestions shortly.) But first, give Hitch his due. For him, I think a set piece was a compact repository of inherently cinematic ideas carried to a limit within a sequence. A set piece is a challenge: How much can you squeeze out of a situation?<\/p>\n

Go back to Foreign Correspondent<\/em>. Setting an assassination in Amsterdam allowed Hitchcock to integrate the idea of a clue based on a waywardly turning windmill. So far, Chandler\u2019s objection seems tenable: The windmill is just a gimmick. But once Hitchcock sets his hero exploring the lair, he can create a set piece that answers a question that no one ever thought to ask before: How do you eavesdrop in a windmill?<\/p>\n

Johnny Jones has to evade the killers by crawling up alongside the giant gears, then down, then up again. At each step he barely escapes being spotted. When he seems safe, his topcoat gets snagged in the grinding gears, so he has to slip his arm out of it\u2014just in time to avoid being crushed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet once Jones is freed from the coat, it\u2019s carried around the gearwork and might be spotted by the gang. And the old diplomat upstairs, mind hazed by drugs, is likely to reveal Jones’ presence. Hitchcock squeezes seven minutes of suspense out of all this, with a casual air that suggests: Of course, dear chap, any director worth his salary can see that a windmill harbors all kinds of excruciating menace. All in a day\u2019s work, you know.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A whispered terror on the breeze<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If anything is a set piece, the Albert Hall sequence in The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em> is. Philip Kemp\u2019s commentary for the Criterion DVD considers it Hitch\u2019s first, although aficionados would probably consider the \u201cknife\u201d sound montage of Blackmail<\/em> at the very least a rough sketch for what would come. Lucky you: The entire Albert Hall sequence<\/a> is excerpted on the Criterion site.<\/p>\n

A set piece benefits from a simple premise. Here, Jill\u2019s child is being held hostage, which keeps her from informing the police of what little she knows about the plot. We know that during the concert an assassin will try to shoot a diplomat.<\/p>\n

You can imagine Chandler asking: Why plug Ropa during a concert, with all those witnesses? Why not when the target is on the sidewalk, shot from a rooftop for easy escape? You can hear that bland replying murmur: Raaaymond, it\u2019s only a moovie\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

So we have some conditions for a set piece: a compact piece of action limited in time and space. But there\u2019s also a strong time marker. Ramon the assassin is to wait for a dramatic pause in the score; it\u2019s followed by a shattering choral outburst that will muffle the pistol shot. We\u2019ve been given a rehearsal of the passage in a gramophone record, but since we don\u2019t hear the whole piece then, we can\u2019t predict exactly when the chorus will hit its peak.<\/p>\n

Hitchcock magnifies this uncertainty by letting the piece, Arthur Benjamin\u2019s Storm Clouds Cantata<\/em>, play out in its entirety. Its combination of lyrical and dramatic passages blend into a stream of music that coincides with the emotional action onscreen. I suspect that the piece, composed specifically for the film, glances at the most celebrated new choral piece of the era, William Walton\u2019s Belshazzar\u2019s Feast<\/em> (1931). It too has a charged dramatic pause followed by a tremendous choral blast: \u201cSlain!\u201d You can listen to it here<\/a>, and you can hear some of the musical affinities at 27:11 and after.<\/p>\n

So the self-contained quality of the sequence is enhanced by the unfolding soundtrack, as well as its \u201cbookend\u201d structure: Jill arrives at the Albert Hall\/ Jill leaves. (Hitchcock was very fond of this coming-and-going bracketing; many scenes of The Birds<\/em> are built out of this.) But to be a set piece we need virtuosity too, right?<\/p>\n

As our Film Art<\/em> essay indicates, Hitchcock structures the scene using nearly every technique in the silent-cinema playbook. We get dynamically accentuated compositions, crisp point-of-view editing, subjective vision (even blurring as Jill drifts into a panicky reverie), and suspenseful crosscutting back to the gang holding Bob and Betty prisoner. The techniques build to their own crescendo, with more and shorter shots of Jill, the orchestra players, and the curtain concealing Ramon. As the climax approaches, details of the players\u2019 performance pass in a flash. As another layer, though, all these visual techniques are synchronized with the musical structure of the piece. Most obvious is the slow tracking shot back from Jill as the female soloist launches in:<\/p>\n

There came a whispered terror on the breeze.\/\u00a0<\/em>And the dark forest shook.<\/em><\/p>\n

The text has always teased me, because in my early years of studying the film I couldn\u2019t hear everything there. Now that the Storm Clouds Cantata<\/em> has become a minor concert piece, we have a full version of the text<\/a>. It\u2019s the description of an especially ominous storm, one that drives birds away and makes trees tremble in fear. The only creature left, vulnerable to the gale, is a child:<\/p>\n

Around whose head screaming\/\u00a0<\/em>The night-birds wheeled and shot away.<\/em><\/p>\n

The orchestral and choral forces mount on the line that has always come through the sound mix:<\/p>\n

All save the child\u2014all save the child.<\/em><\/p>\n

The line is ambiguous. Its literal sense is that all the creatures have fled the oncoming storm except the child (\u201call save the child\u201d). But Hitchcock\u2019s cutting and the film\u2019s overall context leave it as an imperative: the child must be rescued. Thus the musical dynamics and the text stress, for us and presumably for Jill, that Betty\u2019s safety depends on what she does.<\/p>\n

Soon the cantata\u2019s text finds another analog in the concert hall. The choir sings of the storm clouds finally breaking and \u201cfinding release.\u201d That phrase, repeated with rising intensity, yields the dramatic pause and then the final outburst that is to cover Ramon\u2019s pistol shot. But now we have to see this phrase as prophecy and comment: Jill\u2019s scream during the pause is the release of her tightened anxiety. And of course the line slyly signals the release of the suspense built up through the whole sequence.<\/p>\n

With Hitchcock, you always get more.<\/p>\n

In all, the sequence becomes exactly what a set piece ought to be: compact, with sharp boundaries and a strongly profiled arc of interest, elaborated with a great variety of technical resources and a thrusting emotional impact.\u00a0But is it too much of an independent sequence? One can imagine Chandler worrying that Hitch doesn\u2019t care much about how to hook it up with everything else. Let\u2019s see.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This scepter\u2019d isle<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s no doubt that a plot driven by set pieces can seem episodic, just a matter of pretty clothes clipped to a slender line. In action movies it\u2019s a classic problem, which, say, Speed<\/em> doesn’t fully solve but Die Hard<\/em> does.<\/p>\n

You can mask an episodic plot, though, through some stratagems. First, make your filler material charming. The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em>\u00a0gives us comedy in the dentist office and in the Tabernacle, with Bob and Clive mumbling messages through hymnody. You can also whisk the audience from scene to scene so quickly that the viewer has to concentrate on local connections. This is one purpose of what I\u2019ve called the hook<\/a>, the transition that smoothly links the end of one scene with the beginning of the next. If you\u2019ve got some plot holes, strengthen your hooks–especially those that hide your gaps.<\/p>\n

The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em> has some nifty hooks. I especially like the way the fingers pointing to the bullet hole are followed by a shot of Ramon\u2019s head: effect and cause neatly given by a straight cut. Then there\u2019s the contrast of the fire in the fireplace dissolving to the skier pin, a sort of thermal hook. But probably the most memorable one is Betty\u2019s line about Ramon\u2019s brilliantined hair.<\/p>\n

This hook is a motif as well, and recurring images or sounds like this can help knit together your movie. In Foreign Correspondent<\/em>, we get hats and birds in various scenes. Here, as our Film Art<\/em> essay indicates, teeth, the skier pin, sharpshooting, the cantata\u2019s main theme, and other motifs weave through the overall structure of the film.<\/p>\n

You can as well knit your big scenes together through certain narrative patterns, such as a trip or a search, both strategies that Hitchcock employs in many movies. In The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em>, Bob\u2019s investigation of the gang follows the menu set out in Louis\u2019 note: the sun emblem, Wapping, G. Barbour, and A. Hall. This serves as a sort of map for the middle act of the film. Once Bob has cracked the message, though, the film shifts into a new register. Jill, who has been waiting passively at home, takes over the role of protagonist. And her actions will fulfill another motif: that of interruption and distraction.<\/p>\n

The film begins with Betty\u2019s dog disrupting Louis\u2019 ski jump. That\u2019s an innocent accident, as is the moment when Jill nearly spoils Roman\u2019s skeet shooting. But soon afterward Abbott\u2019s chiming watch deliberately breaks Jill\u2019s concentration, making her lose the shooting match. In effect the Albert Hall sequence offers payback: With her scream Jill not only disrupts the performance but spoils Ramon\u2019s aim as Abbott had spoiled hers.<\/p>\n

The Albert Hall sequence fits into the film in a less obvious way, one that plays along the thematic dualities that marble the movie. Throughout the film contrasts \u201cEnglishness\u201d with \u201cforeignness,\u201d the latter split between allies (Louis, Ropa) and enemies. The Storm Cloud Cantata<\/em> and what follows represent a sort of triumph of England over her adversaries.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At the St. Moritz resort, the Lawrence family is set off from Louis, their French friend, and two men: Abbott the German and Ramon the Latin. (He\u2019s handily fudged; he has a Spanish name but calls the English \u201cextraordinaire.\u201d And his hair is greasy.) “Sworn enemies, eh?” Jill says half-humorously to Ramon before losing the skeet shoot. After Louis\u2019 death Bob is at a loss in the hotel, unable to speak German or Italian, and distracted while Betty is kidnapped. The English aren\u2019t at home in this world.<\/p>\n

Once Bob and Jill have returned to London, they join the family friend Clive, a Wodehousian upper-class twit but gifted with loyalty and tenacity. Bob and Clive have learned from Gibson of the Foreign Office that the gang intends to assassinate the diplomat Ropa. They must tell what they know; the killing could prove as catastrophic as the assassination that triggered the war of 1914-1918. Yet Bob keeps mum. He might be enacting E. M. Forster\u2019s dictum: \u201cIf I had to choose between betraying my friend and betraying my country, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.\u201d<\/p>\n

The conflict between family love and civic duty is played out in the rest of the second act, when the men\u2019s investigation takes them to a working-class neighborhood of Wapping. There, we learn that behind respectable English institutions\u2014a dentist, eccentric religion\u2014foreign elements lurk. Bob has solved Louis\u2019 riddle, but at the cost of becoming another hostage. Bob and Betty re-meet, in a characteristically subdued stiff-upper-lip encounter that denies Abbott the tearful scene he expected. The dignity with which Bob conducts himself, asking about Betty’s dressing gown and her school grades while staring defiantly at the gang, leaves the others abashed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Clive has escaped, though, and has managed to send Jill to the Albert Hall. That musical set piece initiates the film\u2019s climax dramatically but also thematically. For one thing,\u00a0Benjamin’s cantata reaffirms another bit of Englishness. A national choral tradition runs back to Purcell and Handel, was sharpened in Mendelssohn\u2019s Elijah<\/em>, and was revived in the early twentieth century by Elgar\u2019s Dream of Gerontius<\/em> and Vaughan Williams\u2019 Sea Symphony<\/em>. Hitchcock and screenwriter Charles Bennett could have used Bach or Beethoven, but the choice of this brooding, mildly modernistic piece reminiscent of Walton is a nice bit of propaganda for British musical culture of the interwar years.<\/p>\n

More importantly, the concert sequence solves the film\u2019s ideological problem: How to save the world without destroying your family? Jill\u2019s impulsive scream doesn\u2019t divulge what she and Bob know about the gang, but it does serve to derail the gang\u2019s plan and save Ropa. And by leading the police to follow Ramon to the hideout, she in effect chooses to risk Betty and Bob for the capture of the gang. Here, perhaps, the sheer drive of the action muffles the significance of her choice; Chandler complains that Hitchcock tended to take refuge from plot problems in “wild chases.”<\/p>\n

What follows, in the middle of some violence that remains shocking today, is a vigorous reassertion of Englishness. The vignettes during the siege display stalwart national virtues. A postman insists on making his rounds during the gunplay. An inspector swipes sweets and pauses for a cup of tea. The police reluctantly take up arms, only after several of their unarmed number are mowed down. Slipping into adjacent buildings, snipers move a piano while its fussy owner rescues his potted plant. And a cop who was slated to go off duty finds a warm mattress to die on. This unassuming valor, so different from Ramon\u2019s petulant swagger and Abbott\u2019s self-congratulatory sadism, will win out. The victory is announced by the pent-up crowd rushing jubilantly forward as the siege ends.<\/p>\n

In any other movie the mother would have been huddling with the child and the man would grab a rifle to pick off his enemy on the roof. But making Jill the crack shot reasserts another quintessentially English image: the hunting, shooting, riding mistress of the estate. She gets her second chance to fire, bringing down Ramon when even the police sniper hesitates. It\u2019s also a bit of guilty revenge for the death of Louis, whom Jill danced into the line of fire. Hitchcock, as usual, renders it elliptically: we see Jill grab the gun but not fire it. As she and Bob and Betty are reunited, the movie that began with the line, \u201cAre you all right, sir?\u201d ends with a mother reassuring her weeping daughter, \u201cIt\u2019s all right.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, we might say, is how you integrate set pieces into your movie\u2014narratively, stylistically, and thematically. Others would disagree with me, but nearly forty years of living with this film hasn\u2019t made me change my mind.\u00a0The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em> is Hitchcock\u2019s first thoroughgoing masterpiece.<\/p>\n

\n

Thanks to Abbey Lustgarten, UW-Madison alum, for her excellent production job on the Criterion disc. Thanks also to Peter Becker and Casey Moore for coordinating the posting of our Film Art<\/em> piece with this blog entry.<\/p>\n

For more on Chandler and Hitchcock, see William Luhr, Raymond Chandler and Film<\/em> (New York: Unger, 1982), 81-93. My quotation comes from Raymond Chandler Speaking,<\/em> ed. by Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker (Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 132.<\/p>\n

Hitchcock probably doesn’t deserve 100% of the credit for the Foreign Correspondent<\/em> windmill scene; it was designed by the great William Cameron Menzies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When I wrote the Film Art<\/em> analysis back in the 1970s, Kristin hadn\u2019t elaborated her ideas about how large-scale parts, or acts, can shape a film. Yet I think that the three parts that the analysis mentions constitute pretty well-articulated acts. The first part has as its turning point Bob\u2019s realization that when Gibson traces Betty\u2019s call, police will converge on Wapping and endanger her. So Bob and Clive set out to save her. That decision comes about twenty-six minutes into the movie. I\u2019d mark the end of the second act with Abbott\u2019s sending Ramon on his mission after playing the cantata recording; that comes at about fifty-three minutes into the film. At this point we know everything we need to know, so the premises can play out. The last act is shorter, as climaxes tend to be. The Albert Hall sequence and the final shootout and rescue take up the final twenty-three minutes, capped by a very brief epilogue of the reunited family. For more on act structure, see Kristin\u2019s entry\u00a0here<\/a>, mine here<\/a>, and my essay on action movies<\/a>, as well as Kristin\u2019s Storytelling in the New Hollywood<\/em> and my The Way Hollywood Tells It.<\/em><\/p>\n

A final note: Frank Vosper, who plays Ramon, was a well-known stage actor and playwright. His most famous play is Love from a Stranger<\/em> (1936); the film version was released in 1937. Another successful Vosper play was the fantasy comedy Murder on the Second Floor<\/em> (1929), in which a writer devises a play consisting of all the clich\u00e9s of sensational mystery fiction. But the Vosper play that piques my curiosity most is his 1927 drama called\u2014I\u2019m not kidding\u2014Spellbound<\/em>.<\/p>\n

See? With Hitchcock you always get more.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Man Who Knew Too Much.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). DB here: Hitchcock made six remarkable thrillers from 1934 through 1938, and I have long believed that the first one was the best. I think very well of Sabotage, and both The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps are strong contenders. But for me, The Man Who Knew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,165,2,1,291,5,58,46,91,115,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-directors-hitchcock","category-dvds","category-film-art","category-film-comments","category-film-music","category-film-technique","category-technique-editing","category-film-technique-music","category-film-technique-sound","category-national-cinemas-uk","category-silent-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21930"}],"version-history":[{"count":46,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45413,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21930\/revisions\/45413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}