The Criterion Collection

Alfred Hitchcock was coming off a string of critical failures when he made The Man Who Knew Too Much. His inaugural film made under the auspices of the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, it would turn out to be the first in a series of six internationally successful pictures, also including The 39 Steps, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes.

Hitchcock gave the Hungarian-born actor Peter Lorre his first English-speaking role when he cast him as the villain Abbot. Lorre once said, “I always used to watch [Hitchcock] like a hawk—and whenever I thought the end of a story was coming, I used to roar with laughter. And somehow he got the impression that I spoke English.”

The film opens in St. Moritz, Switzerland—the resort town where Hitchcock and his wife, Alma, honeymooned and holidayed every year for the rest of their lives.

The script for the St. Moritz dining room sequence called for a table where two older women sit, knitting and talking. Hitchcock retained only one element from that scene: he gave the knitting to Edna Best’s character, and had her husband, played by Leslie Banks, attach it to a dancer’s coat, to great comic effect.

The Man Who Knew Too Much marks the first time Hitchcock employed the theme of ordinary people getting caught up in events outside of the usual scope of their lives, such as the machinations of spy rings or the workings of international politics—an idea he would revisit many times.

Frank Vosper, who plays the chief heavy, Ramon, was visited by tragedy in 1937, only three years after he appeared in The Man Who Knew Too Much and in the midst of a thriving stage and screen career. He was returning from New York to London by ocean liner when he fell overboard and drowned. It was suggested he may have committed suicide, though no one knows for sure.

Hitchcock employed the Schüfftan process—named after the German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan—for a few wide shots of the audience at London’s Royal Albert Hall. For these, most of the image was in fact painted on a mirror, while a few live actors were strategically positioned and filmed through the mirror, in places where the silvering had been scraped away.

The climax of the film, where the police surround the hideout of Abbott and his gang, was based on 1911’s infamous real-life Siege of Sidney Street, in which two hundred armed police were called in to capture the anarchist Peter the Painter. On the front lines directing the siege was Britain’s thirty-seven-year-old home secretary, Winston Churchill. Hitchcock and his production designer, Alfred Junge, referred to newspaper photographs to recreate the scene.

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (whom we interviewed for this release) finds comparing this earlier, British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much to Hitchcock’s later, American version to be like “comparing a miniature, a Vermeer—understated, beautiful in the stillness and the economy of all the artistic gestures—to a mural or a billboard, a very flashy, large billboard in the middle of a very populated avenue.” He concludes, “I prefer, in this instance, the Vermeer.”

The British Board of Censors had a few issues with the script for The Man Who Knew Too Much. One in particular was the police’s carrying of firearms in the climactic shootout scene—not standard in Britain, then or now. According to the censors’ report, Hitchcock agreed to alter the ending “so as to bring it into accord with ordinary police methods in London,” but we can see that he ignored this concession.

Abbey Lustgarten is a producer at the Criterion Collection.