- 77 -

In a generally favorable contemporary review of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Forsyth Hardy observed that "with Murder in mind, the surprise of the film is the absence of any expressive use of sound."[1] If by "expressive" sound Hardy is referring to virtuoso effects, then he is right; there is nothing equivalent to the choric chanting in Murder or the knife sequence in Blackmail. However, Hitchcock is still very much experimenting with sound in The Man Who Knew Too Much—in less obvious ways. With this film Hitchcock finds a successful formula that will enable him to develop his concerns with the deeper impulses of human behavior without resorting to noticeable expressionistic devices. It is the first film in the classical style that will characterize such films as Young and Innocent (1937), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941).[2]

The classical method requires Hitchcock to manipulate his sounds within a realistic context. On the stylistic level this means that he has to provide a literal pretext for any exaggerated use of sound. On the thematic level, the method requires the incorporation of the aural effects into the plot itself, so that they are so obvious and so essential that they do not jar with the style of the rest of the film.

One means of amplifying a sound with a literal source is to find a plausible second sound that provides an aural correlative for the original sound. This substitution technique is akin to the use of "objects as visual correlatives" that Andrew Sarris has observed in Hitchcock's films.[3] In The Man Who Knew Too Much, vases serve this function during a shootout at the spies' hideout at Wapping. The director wants to show that the spies are gradually being

- 78 -

overcome by the police who are firing at them through the windows, but he does not want to eliminate his few spies too soon lest he also eliminate the suspense. He therefore uses vases, which line the room's shelves, as a visual substitute for and aural extension of the destruction being sustained. Hitchcock presumably does not want to actually depict the violence of the spies' deaths; not only does Hitchcock prefer implication, but also Hollywood's gangster films had created a revulsion in England against excessive violence. He was able to suggest the impact of the bullets by showing the shattering and toppling of vases (just as Howard Hawks had shown Gaffney's murder through indirection in Scarface two years earlier by having the camera follow a bowling ball released by the murdered man to its target, where a last pin wavers and finally topples). Similarly, the sounds of gunshots from down the street, even if realistic (at this time sound-effects recordists had to find substitutes for the sounds of shots because recording the real sound would have blown out their sensitive equipment), were multiplied and amplified by the sounds of numerous vases shattering and crashing to the floor. In much the same way, Hitchcock uses crockery during a donnybrook in Young and Innocent and balloons during a birthday party in The Birds to intensify the effects of destruction.

The other way to manipulate sounds within realistic limitations is to carefully control the use of' ambient noise, that is, the sounds that might occur naturally in the background of a given location. Background noises can be juggled quite extensively before the audience will notice them. Hitchcock was fond of saying that a "decisive factor" in The Man Who Knew Too Much was "the contrast between the snowy Alps and the congested streets of London," which he told Truffaut was a "visual concept [that] had to be embodied in the film.[4] For the transition between the Swiss and the British scenes Hitchcock dissolves from snowy mountains to a night shot of Piccadilly Circus and from the jingle of sleigh bells to the noise of traffic. Otherwise, he barely indicates any visual congestion of London. He depends much more on sound for ambience.

For instance, when the film's two heroes, Lawrence and Clive, first arrive at Wapping, the sound track is busy with boat whistles, handorgan music, car horns, and traffic, but we see little activity.

- 79 -

(Of course, this is the more economic way of creating ambience in a tightly budgeted studio.) As the men walk upstairs and wait outside a dentist's office that is a front for espionage activities. Hitchcock keeps up the level of ambient noise. However, while we wait outside with Lawrence once Clive has gone into the office with an unsavory-looking dentist, Hitchcock eliminates all but a few token exterior noises, to focus our concentration on the closed door. Our expectations are rewarded with a scream (dive's), which confirms our fears about both assassins and dentists. (An earlier association between the assassin and dentistry is suggested when Lawrence's daughter observes that she does not like the assassin because he uses too much brilliantine and has too many teeth.) It is important to the film that Wapping is the kind of seamy location in which a scream goes unheeded. The plausibility of its going unnoticed by the outside world has been increased by the introduction of that world as a noisy location.

In Hitchcock's American remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), it is the first setting (in this version, Marrakesh) that is noisy and London that is quiet.[5] Hitchcock emphasizes the congestion of Marrakesh by staging the murder of the spy in the marketplace. Contrasted with the noisy setting is the placidity of the Jimmy Stewart character—Hitchcock has specifically described his character as "an earnest and quiet man."[6] The manipulation of the ambient noise to underline this contrast is done with great care. For instance, there is a scene in a police station in which Stewart and his wife talk with a police officer. The shots alternate between the couple's view of the policeman, which includes a view through the window of the busy city, and the policeman's view of the couple, who are sitting across from him before a blank wall. Although the ambient noise should theoretically not vary, in fact. Hitchcock raises the traffic noise when we see the city and lowers it significantly when we are looking at Stewart. I have described this detail to distinguish between the early and later appearances of the classical style. The manipulation of ambient noise is already present in the 1934 film, but in relatively crude form. Later versions of Hitchcock's techniques are almost always more refined.

If the technical aspects of the classical style are superior in the

- 80 -

second version, however, those thematic aspects which the films share are already fully developed in the first. That is to say. Hitchcock has so neatly incorporated his thematic elements into the plot and characterization that they are all but invisible to the viewer who does not want to look for them. The point where the themes all coalesce is the famous Albert Hall sequence, in which a diplomat is to be assassinated. The spies plan to have the sound of the assassin's gunshot at the concert hall be masked by the sound of cymbals crashing, so that the structural climax of the film corresponds with the musical climax of a dramatic cantata being performed. At the concert is a woman, Mrs. Lawrence, who knows about the plot but has been warned that her .intervention would mean the death of her kidnapped daughter. Thus, her last-second scream, which saves the diplomat, is also the thematic climax of a film whose moral dilemma has been a couple's choice between the life of their daughter and that of a famous diplomat, between the family and the state, between love and duty.

The choice between screaming and remaining silent is related to one of the film's major concerns: the contrast between silence and oral expression that differentiates the spies from the heroes of the film. Furthermore, the concert sequence creates a conjunction of music and murder, the one a sign of order, the other a sign of chaos. The silence-versus-expression antinomy operates on an individual level. The music-versus-murder antinomy operates on a social level. These two antinomies merge at the concert sequence, which poses in concrete terms the central tension of this and other Hitchcock films: the problem of how to reconcile the need for social order with the need for personal expression. As my analysis will show, on the social level Hitchcock is more or less on the side of control; on the personal level he is more or less on the side of expression.

The silence-versus-expression motif is developed through contrasts of characters. The Man Who Knew Too Much is the first of Hitchcock's films to suggest that for criminals to be effective they must work quietly, a concept that is most fully and literally developed in Family Plot, where the kidnappers always remain mute in their dealings with lawmen. In both films silence is associated with singleminded dedication to one's task. Noise and talking reveal espionage activities and must be avoided at all costs. The

- 81 -

spies would not have known that the Lawrences "knew too much" in the first place if Lawrence had not talked too loudly about it in a hotel hall in Saint Moritz. Even shooting is to be avoided if possible. The spies battle Lawrence and Clive in their church with chairs rather than guns because they do not want the police to hear. During the brawl the woman spy tells the organist to play a hymn to cover up the sound of the scuffle. The spies engage in the final shoot-out with the police only because their hideout has been discovered. Thus it is altogether appropriate that their assassination attempt involves their concealing a gunshot under the sound of crashing cymbals. Similarly, it is appropriate that their kidnapping involves keeping the Lawrences quiet. Despite the film's title, it is not the Lawrences' knowing too much, so much as their telling anyone, that concerns the spies. The idea of "keeping your mouth shut" is literalized by Hitchcock, who has Lawrence tell Clive to do precisely that after Clive has had his tooth extracted in the cause of their search for the daughter.

The most efficient, and the quietest, character in The Man Who Knew Too Much is the woman spy, who even after being shot, dies without a sound, and who spends a good deal of time trying to keep her brother, Abbott, the spy ringleader, from not getting sidetracked from his work. Talking too much is Abbott's fatal flaw. It is also what gives him (as played by Peter Lorre) his personality because it humanizes him. He likes to chat, to make puns, and to laugh. He is so identified by his musical Swiss watch that, when Lawrence is searching for him in the hideoutchurch, his presence can be revealed by the sound of the watch chiming while he is still offscreen.

Keeping quiet involves controlling one's emotions. Abbott tells Lawrence, "You should learn to control your fatherly feelings and not drop things on the floor" and challenges the father not to give away his feelings when he is reunited with his daughter in the spies' hideout. That reunion sequence is matched later against the scene of the woman spy's death, in which Abbott cannot entirely suppress his despair.

In previous chapters I have suggested that silence is a symptom of moral paralysis; in The Man Who Knew Too Much it is also a sign of emotional paralysis. For Hitchcock implies that always keeping

- 82 -

quiet requires the unhealthy suppression of emotions. Unlike the spies, the Lawrences are talkers. Volubility is a sign of emotional life, of spontaneity, of irrepressibility. In the second scene of the film, the skeet-shooting finals between Mrs. Lawrence and Ramon, who, it will turn out, is the spies' assassin, the Lawrence daughter spoils her mother's shot by talking too much. The mother remarks, "Let that be a lesson to you not to have children." Like most jokers, she is partly serious, although her actions for the rest of the film show that she prefers life, and having a daughter, to winning. (She does win in the "contest" that involves a life, rather than just winning an artificial game.) A moment later it is the mother who is shushed by the crowd for talking too much (as she is saying that she will "disown the child" if she loses), and the assassin wins the championship. There is a structural connection linking the first two confrontations between these two sharpshooter-antagonists. At the skeet-shooting match the daughter's speaking makes the mother miss a shot. At Albert Hall the mother's screaming makes the assassin miss.

Thus, the concert sequence, which is usually considered merely a clever device for producing suspense, is related to the tension in the rest of the film between keeping quiet and revealing one's feelings. (More obviously, the concert sequence is also a confrontation between the good and evil forces.) At the concert the mother is torn between two forms of behavior—one trained, one instinctual. The audience sympathizes with both. One choice is not to disturb a concert, not to make a fool of oneself in public—a behavior pattern that has been instilled in us from an early age. The other choice is the impulse to cry out at a moment of danger. When the mother screams in the nick of time to prevent the assassination, she is not so much going against maternal instinct (by risking the life of her child) as responding to the more immediate instinct of wanting to save the ambassador's life. Thus, her behavior here is one and the same healthy expression of emotion as her daughter's talking at the shooting match, and both are opposed to the unnatural repression of emotion typical of the spies.

The two screams elicited by the spies at different points in the film provide a measure of the extent to which anarchic forces have intruded into civilization. The spies' threat moves from an isolated

- 83 -

room in a seamy suburb to an Albert Hall concert at the political and cultural center of British society. If a scream goes unheeded when emitted from a slum dentist's office, it is altogether conspicuous and inappropriate at a concert, and that is why it is an effective means for Mrs. Lawrence to save a diplomat's life.

The whole notion of staging the film's climax at a concert is particularly useful because Hitchcock can work with the concept of musical order in two ways, stylistic and thematic. A comparison of the role of music in both versions of the film reveals once again that, while both thoroughly develop the thematic associations of music, the second is a decided improvement on the first in its stylistic use of music. Hitchcock has said that "the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.[7] He was, as usual, assessing his films only according to their craftsmanship, and in that area he is certainly right. In both films the stylistic function of the music is to create suspense. Music is such a useful tool for Hitchcock because a piece of music has its own structure, a preestablished order against which he can time the struggles of his characters.

Truffaut and Hitchcock together have quite thoroughly analyzed the improvements in the second version of the concert sequence itself.[8] They have not so thoroughly discussed the preparation for the sequence, however. In the British version of the film Hitchcock gives us little chance to hear the musical phrase during which the shot will be fired. A considerable portion of the piece ("The Storm Cloud Cantata" by Arthur Benjamin) is played under the opening titles, but it stops short, just before the last four notes that comprise the crucial phrase. The four notes in isolation are first heard just before the concert, as Abbott plays them for the assassin (really for the audience, of course) on a record player. The American version is much more sophisticated aurally and visually in acquainting the audience with the music so that the suspense can be milked. Just a look at the scene in which the spies play the record reveals the added clarity of Hitchcock's later version—a clarity evidently based on a greater self-awareness of the elements of his own style. In the later film the spies provide the context of the musical phrase, and they play the record twice. In the first version the playing of the record is photographed in deep. .focus, so

- 84 -

that we may watch the expressions of the father and daughter in the center and depth of the image, with Abbott and the assassin less conspicuously located on either side of the frame and nearer the camera. In the second version Hitchcock simplifies the shot (the three spies in it are all looking at the phonograph; the hostages are not seen), thereby forcing us to pay closer attention to the music. There is no emotional distraction.

Formal considerations aside, Hitchcock established with the first Man Who Knew Too Much the thematic role that classical music would usually play from then on in his films; the concert is a staid ritual of refined society. During the film's violent confrontations the spies use music to cover their activities. Their first assassination is that of a British spy in Saint Moritz who is shot while he is dancing with Mrs. Lawrence. Hitchcock does not emphasize the point, but this assassination, too, is concealed by music. The gunshot occurs on a musical beat, and the sound heard is not of a bullet but of window glass breaking. Even the victim himself looks down with surprise, after not noticing for a moment that he is wounded. As is noted above, the spies try to cover the noise of the brawl in their church with music. At the end of the hymn, the organist plays a solemn amen. Church music is, of course, even more staid than choral music, and so we experience a frisson of pleasure when Lawrence earlier gets the chance to "naughtily" sing false words to a hymn while he is trying to warn Clive of their danger. (It is the same antiauthoritarian pleasure we get out of seeing grown men and women fighting in church.) Their disregard for the normal lyrics of the hymn may be seen as a foreshadowing, like the daughter's talking during the match, of the mother's "naughty," antisocial scream during the concert. The disrespect for music by the so-called moral forces in the film is continued, in a minor way, even during the final shoot-out, when two policemen, commandeering one citizen's parlor, use his piano as a barricade, after the first policeman has scolded his younger partner for playing a few notes on the piano by saying, "This is a scrap, not a ... concert."

The evil forces cover their activities with a front of respectability (rreligious and cultural). By contrast, the good side has to be disrespectful to cultural institutions to preserve them. The conjunction

- 85 -

of music and murder is one of Hitchcock's many ways of showing that evil lurks very near the surface of respectability. Just as the attachment of Mrs. Lawrence's knitting to the coat of someone about to be killed juxtaposes "the domestic and the sinister,"[9] so the interruption of music by assassinations suggests that domestic and national security are very fragile illusions—as tenuous as a thread of yarn that breaks when a man dies; that security and control are gained at the cost of repressing natural instincts; and that a scream may be more civilized than a cantata.

p 85 - 86

Notes:

1. "Films of the Quarter," Cinema Quarterly 3 (Winter 1935): 119.

2. Films that combine classical and subjective techniques in varying proportions include The Thirty-nine Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936). Saboteur (1942), Lifeboat (1943), Dial M for Murder (1954), To Catch a Thief {1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

3. Andrew Sams, The American Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), p. 58.

4. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967; originally pub-lished as Le Cinema selon Hitchcock [Paris: Robert Laffont, 1966]), p. 61.

5. In the American version the characterizations of the heroes are more complex, and there is an added subjective component. See below, chapter 9, p. 163.

6. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 170.

7. Ibid., p. 65.

8. Ibid., pp. 63-65.

9. Raymond Durgnat, The Strange Case a/Alfred Hitchcock or The Plain Man's Hitchcock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), p. 123.

Share your thoughts with others! Post your comment in Silent Scream's guestbook!

Visit FilmSound.org - resource site dedicated to the Art of Sound Design