I am an honest man when I ain't lying

I don't know if Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favorite filmmakers. I have seen twenty of his films,* which is probably more than I have by anyone who didn't direct for television; if he doesn't make me seize strangers' lapels and proselytize like Powell and Pressburger, I know I don't dislike him. Some of his movies, from acknowledged masterpieces like Notorious and Vertigo to lesser lights like Suspicion, I could watch over and over. To this number I can now add The Man Who Knew Too Much, which I saw a few nights ago—not the more famous version which got "Que Sera, Sera" stuck in everyone's head, but the 1934 original with Leslie Banks, Edna Best, and Peter Lorre in his first English-language role. It surprised me. I have the impression I saw the remake at some point in my childhood, although I can remember no details—I understand now that Foul Play (1978) is riffing off the assassination plot in both versions—but I have a hard time believing I would prefer it. Even more so than The Lady Vanishes or The 39 Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) jags unpredictably from coziness to chilling realization, horror to humor with liberal eccentricity throughout; you never know which way the narrative is going to jump. I didn't expect a turnabout of gender roles from Hitchcock—diffident and sometimes clumsy as he is, the leading man isn't a silly ass, but neither does his homespun detecting metamorphose him into an effective man of action; his wife is the sharpshooter, familiarly blonde, but no cool and alluring foil: she is the mother of a kidnapped daughter and when the police hang back from shooting an assassin for fear of hitting the kid, she seizes the rifle and dispatches him herself, like the narrator's mother in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber." The villain is not a mastermind, but a conversational anarchist, quite friendly with the Lawrences when he meets them in Switzerland, amused at the altered roles of all concerned once the wrong information has changed hands; he will not scruple to kill a twelve-year-old girl, but he is not a sadist. And yet he laughs so mercurially, with an elm-streak of white in his hair; it's funny until it's not and then it's funny again. There's an interlude at the dentist's. There's an interlude with a cult. The stakes are high, but no one hangs off the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore—the police don't even carry guns until someone fetches them. It's a short-story movie and I do not disdain those, especially when they are such tonally shifting sand that the viewer can't even conjecture who's going to make it to the end credits, even among the protagonists. (We never even learn the motives behind this attempt on a foreign diplomat's life. The British government wants the man alive and well and politically active, but who knows? We might side with Abbott and his gang.) I have run out of intelligent things to say, except why has Criterion not put this film out on DVD? I will have to think about it more when I'm awake.

* The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Jamaica Inn (1949), Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Saboteur (1942), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Rope (1948), Under Capricorn (1949), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964), Torn Curtain (1966). I realize there are some odd gaps in this list; probably the ones I want most to see at the moment are Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951), and Frenzy (1972), but I'll take recommendations.