Daily Archives: Monday, June 20, 2016

  • The Man Who Knew Too Much

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1956)

    The first half hour is crisp and inviting as it introduces the main characters and develops the peculiar situation they soon find themselves in.  The McKennas, who live in Indianapolis, are travelling in Morocco.  The father Ben (James Stewart) is a doctor, his wife Jo (Doris Day) a former singing star who retired from the stage to bring up their young son Hank (Christopher Olsen).  On a coach journey to Marrakesh, the family meet a Frenchman called Louis Bernard (Daniel   Gélin ). He’s initially helpful but, in Jo’s mind anyway, increasingly suspicious.  As the McKennas arrive at their Marrakesh hotel, a middle-aged couple (Bernard Miles and Brenda de Banzie) are coming out and the wife gives the McKennas an odd look (which turns out to be a giveaway).  Ben and Jo dine with this British couple, the Draytons, after Bernard has suddenly reneged on his invitation to take them to dinner.  The McKennas are baffled and angry when he then enters the restaurant with another woman.   This whole sequence is really good.  The conversation with the Draytons, who show the Americans how to eat food according to local custom, is surprisingly naturalistic yet still has an edge.  James Stewart reminds you of his easy comic flair as he repeatedly tries to arrange his long legs under a low table.  (This is the bit that Sally particularly enjoyed as a kid, on a rare family visit to the cinema, when the film was first released.)  By lunchtime next day, Louis Bernard has been stabbed to death; with his dying breath, he tells Ben McKenna that a foreign statesman is going to be assassinated in London any day and that the British authorities must be warned.  Shortly afterwards, Hank is kidnapped by the duplicitous Draytons, who turn out to be part of the assassination plot.

    Once Ben and Jo take a plane to London, the plot doesn’t so much thicken as congeal, the pace of The Man Who Knew Too Much slackens, and the people in the story matter less as individuals.  It’s something of a relief when the Draytons are revealed to be baddies:  until they are, the taken-as-read superiority of the American and British characters and some of their remarks about French, North African and Muslim ways of life give the movie a racist streak.  It’s never clear why a home counties-ish couple like the Draytons are mixed up in this attempted coup but the script by John Michael Hayes (based on a story by Charles Bennett) is generally vague about the politics and geography of the story.  Who Louis Bernard and the Draytons are spying for matters less than that they’re spying for someone.  The statesman whose life is threatened turns out to be the prime minister of an unnamed European country:  his and his compatriots’ evening dress and thick accents suggest Ruritania.   Much more of a problem is Hitchcock’s lack of interest in exploring the possible tension between what compels the McKennas as parents and what they seem to see as a moral imperative to thwart the assassination plot.  Getting their young son back must be more important to them than the survival of an unknown politician but their twin objectives to find Hank and save the prime minister induce in Ben and Jo an undifferentiated anxiety.   This culminates in the countdown to the moment that a gun is fired during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall.  Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the score for the film, conducts the on-screen orchestra and Hitchcock is evidently enjoying his own orchestration here but the sequence goes on too long – probably because we’ve already seen much of it as an accompaniment to the opening credits (where it works well).   As the orchestra gets closer and closer to the clash of cymbals that’s the assassin’s cue, Doris Day gets increasingly tearful but her emotion didn’t make much sense to me.   You get the impression here of an actress not being sure what to do and the director not caring what she does as long as she acts.

    As well as acting (pretty well, much of the time), Doris Day also sings.  Hitchcock, who had already made this story in 1934, told Truffaut that the earlier version was ‘ the work of a talented amateur’ whereas his second attempt was ‘made by a professional’.  Nevertheless, the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much is probably best known for the Oscar-winning song ‘Que Sera, Sera’, by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans .   This is performed twice:  first, without musical accompaniment and as a duet between Jo and Hank, as he’s getting ready for bed as his parents prepare to go out to the restaurant.   It’s Jo’s scream just as the cymbals clash at the Albert Hall that causes the gunman to miss his target:  the bullet does no more than graze the prime minister’s arm.  In gratitude for Jo’s lifesaving intervention, he invites her and Ben to his country’s embassy, where the treacherous ambassador was expecting by this point to be celebrating a coup d’état and where Hank is supervised by Mrs Drayon in a locked upstairs room.   Jo entertains the embassy party with songs at the piano, chiefly a marathon reprise of ‘Que Sera, Sera’, sung as loudly as possible to reach Hank’s ears.  It’s a pity that Doris Day is required to belt the number out for purposes of the plot but at least she had a major hit with the song, on both sides of the Atlantic, once filming was over.

    24 August 2012

  • The Man in the White Suit

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alexander Mackendrick (1951)

    What works so well is the ending – and just before the ending.  Like Whisky Galore!, the tale of Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness)  is told confidently by Alexander Mackendrick but the satire is far from subtle and the laughs, for me, are few and far between.  Sidney invents a fibre which is stainproof and indestructible, and terrifies bosses and workers alike.  The lampooning of capital and labour is vigorously obvious.  Because Sidney is unassuming, resourceful and eccentric, the Ealing ethos leads you to expect him to prevail and the clumsily defensive establishments that oppose him to get their comeuppance.  It’s not a surprise that the miraculous white fabric turns out to be unstable.  It’s visually and emotionally shocking, however, when the mob of union members and mill owners run Sidney to ground and, to their amused, astonished relief, start tearing pieces off his suit, and leave him standing in the street with no jacket or trousers.  The scene is disorienting:  a few screen seconds before the disintegration of Sidney’s suit and science, an elderly washerwoman rounds on him.  His invention will destroy her livelihood too:  ‘Why can’t you scientists leave well alone?’ she asks angrily.  With the humiliation of Sidney that follows, the maverick scientific spirit seems suddenly to have become the villain of the piece.  The film’s very last scene is as much a relief for the audience as the penultimate one was for the vested interests of the textile industry.   The voiceover of Sidney’s ex-employer, Alan Birnley (Cecil Parker), which also introduced the story, announces that the crisis is over and that ‘we’ve seen the last of Sidney Stratton’.  But Sidney leaves the factory with his lab notebook as well as his cards.  He looks at the notebook and smiles.  ‘I see!’, he exclaims and walks off jauntily en route to his next invention.  ‘At least I hope we’ve seen the last of him’, replies Birnley’s voice, now uncertain.

    Alec Guinness makes that closing smile a beatific one – and he makes The Man in the White Suit.  Although he has academic qualifications as a scientist, Sidney Stratton starts the film pushing a trolley round the factory.  His rise to wealth – first because the textile magnates want to market his product then, when they realise its implications, to pay to suppress its launch – is meteoric, to put it mildly.  Guinness’s looks and voice make Sidney a distinctly middle-class worker.  He doesn’t belong in a trade union but the story wouldn’t work as well if he did:  Sidney is a man apart.  Joan Greenwood is Birnley’s daughter Daphne, who takes a fancy to Sidney (it’s reciprocated but, as usual with Guinness when he’s kissing on screen, the phrase that comes to mind is lip service).  Although Greenwood is better than usual here, her mannered expressions and readings make all the characters she plays seem insincere.  It is painful when Daphne looks scornfully at Sidney as his suit falls to pieces but the effect is momentary because you already knew from Greenwood’s playing of her that Daphne was calculating, as eager to thwart her father and his henchmen as to find true love.   Cecil Parker’s characterisation of Birnley is familiar – a thin layer of pomposity over a core of anxious cowardice – but Parker is a very likeable actor.  As a more powerfully malignant magnate, Ernest Thesiger made me laugh when he laughed – that is, when he wheezed sepulchrally.  As a younger mill owner and Daphne’s intended until Sidney appears on the scene, Michael Gough is good, as usual.  The cast also includes Miles Malleson as a tailor.  The music by Benjamin Frankel seems rather overwrought for the subject and tone of what’s on screen – although that’s preferable to the sounds of bubbling lab chemicals etc which are meant to supply a comic complement. Mackendrick wrote the screenplay with John Dighton and Roger MacDougall.

    29 November 2012

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