Operation: Conquer the Netflix Queue: The Man Who Knew Too Much

Hey, look! It's a post related to the actual reason I started this blog!  And it only took me a week and a half to do it.  At this rate, it will take me 21 years to complete this project.  I'm going to have to pick up the pace.

Anyway, first up in the queue was Alfred Hitchcock's The Man who Knew too Much (1934), starring Peter Lorre, Leslie Banks, and Edna Best.  Banks and Best play Bob and Jill Lawrence, respectively, a couple vacationing in Switzerland with their young daughter, Betty (Nova Pilbeam).  Their vacation is interrupted when their friend Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay) is killed in the middle of a dinner party.   His last request to them is to find a note that he has hidden in his room and take it to the British Consulate.  In their attempt to grand their friend's last wish, the Lawrences find themselves caught up in a plot to assassinate a foreign dignitary. As if that wasn't complicated enough, when the assassins learn that the Bob and Jill are aware of the plot, they kidnap Betty to keep them quiet, and the Lawrences must try to save their daughter's life at the same time as they try to prevent the assassination.

I hadn't seen this movie before, but Hitchcock is one of my favorite filmmakers, so I knew I was in for a treat.  I wasn't disappointed.  I like the he builds the story, and how he uses lighting and camera angles.  There is a scene in which Bob finds himself fighting the would be assassins in a large hall.  There is a lot of chair-throwing.  For this scene, Hitchcock cut between wide angle shots and close ups, lending a sense of chaos and confusion.  It's hard for viewers watching to fully grasp what is happening until a wide shot at the end of the fight which shows the extent of the destruction it caused.  It's great.  I couldn't look away from it.  And I'm pretty fidgety, so that doesn't happen all the time, even with movies I like.

I liked the acting in the movie too.  One of my favorite things about watching old movies in general is seeing how acting styles change from one era of film to the next.  It wasn't too long before this film was made that sound was first introduced, so sometimes you still get some of the bigger gestures and facial expressions that were common in silent films, but not so much in later eras.  And it's a vastly different style from what you see in contemporary films.  Jill especially has a few moments that, if I didn't know any better, I'd say would be more at home in a melodrama than a thriller.  I don't mean that negatively, it's just one of those stylistic differences that might look foreign to a contemporary film audience.

This was a good way to kick off the project.  Up next, a contemporary take on film noir.