THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
1956,
Universal,
120 min,
USA,
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock remakes his own entertaining but lightweight 1934 thriller as a melancholy examination of the pleasures and nightmares of family life. When the son of James Stewart and Doris Day is kidnapped while on vacation, the couple’s long-simmering resentments threaten to get in the way of their attempts to rescue him. Although the film is rightly celebrated for setpieces like the famous Albert Hall assassination sequence, the depth of Hitchcock’s vision is more effectively felt in the film’s quieter moments: The scene in which Stewart tells Day their son has been kidnapped is one of the most powerful in all of Hitchcock’s cinema.