On M List of Movie Reviews
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The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Rate:
4
Viewed:
6/19
6/19:
Oh, somebody's daughter has been kidnapped?
Like I care. The Man Who Knew Too Much is a sloppy, clumsy, and boring whodunnit murder mystery picture that will be
largely improved on by The 39 Steps. Peter Lorre looks silly with his skunk hair. To make matters worse,
everybody appears to be identical. If Alfred Hitchcock added another blonde female with pencil-thin eyebrows, I
would've been lost like I was during 42nd Street.
The beginning bothered me the most, and for a long while, I wasn't able to shake off the poor editing. A stock
footage of a skier was shown, and he crashed in front of the girl who's certainly acting on a sound stage. The rest was
a mishmash of a failed film school project: just awful on all levels.
Alfred Hitchcock lost me during the shootout which is the most boring scene of them all. I could've gone to the kitchen
to make something to eat and come back ten minutes later, having missed nothing. The chair-throwing scene? Come on, give me
a break.
By the way, the director made a cameo appearance in many of his films, but it's quite hard, rather impossible,
to spot him in this one. In fact, I never saw him at all. He can be seen on the right side of the building at the 34th minute mark as the London bus with
the "Isle of Man" advertisement is passing through.
All in all, if The 39 Steps is Alfred Hitchcock's most refined work, The Man Who Knew Too Much is his clumsiest.