THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Alfred Hitchcock
Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre
A couple on a skiing holiday in Switzerland get caught up in some cloak-and-dagger work when a gang of assassins kidnap their daughter. Hitchcock had found his groove by the time he made this. It's playful, suspenseful, sadistic and coldly detached: a triumph of technique, not just as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. Peter Lorre's first film in English, and he really knows how to get on your nerves.
