THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (48)

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock (1934)

Starring: Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre

The Pitch: An English couple on holiday in Switzerland get involved with international terrorists, who kidnap their daughter.

Theo Sez: Maybe it's just that the laziness and incoherence of 90s action movies have put me in an ugly mood, but it's hard to stomach the lacunae and implausibilities of this cheerfully ramshackle thriller - or to disagree with Hitchcock himself, who called it "the work of a talented amateur". It's a film in which people who've been shot through the heart still have time to recite detailed instructions before they expire ; in which the villains unaccountably discuss their plans right in front of our hero ; in which the best marksman in Europe is unable to kill (but merely wounds) said hero from ten yards away ; in which the parents of a girl kidnapped while on a family holiday carry on as though nothing had happened, even going home - sans daughter - when the holiday is over (ostensibly because the girl was abducted to ensure their silence about secret information they've uncovered - but surely they'd report the kidnapping, if nothing else!). Above all, the yeah-right factor gets in the way of the suspense : even the famous Albert Hall sequence is too unconvincing for much excitement because (unlike in the superior 1956 remake) the heroine has no idea what she's trying to prevent - she wouldn't even have known there was anything wrong if the villains hadn't needlessly (and inexplicably) tipped their hand. That the film, despite everything, isn't a disaster is because its ineptitude - and it is inept - isn't the result (as it is in 90s action movies) of a cynical contempt for the audience : if anything it's the opposite, borne of a conviction that the audience will be as condescending towards this lowbrow genre as the writers were, and as unconcerned with verisimilitude - not because they're dumb, but because they're sophisticated. It's the product of an age when escapist movie-making was a poor relation to writing novels and staging plays, not to be taken seriously (a conviction bolstered, in this case, by the English love for enthusiastic amateurism and "muddling through") : it has the same airy insouciance as THE 39 STEPS from a year later, except that the jokes are better in that movie and that these stars - smug, bumptious Banks and the stocky, moon-faced Best as his wife - are no match for Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. An irritating film but also, oddly enough, a refreshing one.