“You must pay the price for your genius.”

Alfred Hitchock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (not to be confused with his later film bearing the same title that stars James Stewart and Doris Day) contains among its narrative elements both a successful public assassination and a failed one, a child kidnapping and blackmail, and a brutal shootout that claims about a dozen victims. Despite these rather dark developments, the film plays like a jaunty comedy. As innocent British tourists the Lawrences (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) get caught between dueling secret agents while on a vacation in Switzerland, they must do their best spy impressions in order to rescue their abducted daughter (Nova Pilbeam). Whether taking on a wicked dentist (Henry Oscar) or throwing chairs inside a temple of sun cultists, Bob Lawrence and his sidekick Clive (Hugh Wakefield) do so with unnatural gaiety and poise. Even Mrs. Lawrence, a deadeye skeet shooter, scarcely blinks when she sees her daughter evading a ruthless hitman (Frank Vosper) on a nearby rooftop. Instead of screaming or fainting, she takes a gun from a timid policeman and plugs the assassin. Peter Lorre, in his first real English-speaking role, stars as the slimy villain, committedly chewing up the scenery just as he does his phonetically-learned lines. Elsewhere, Hitchcock makes creative use of his implements to emphasize his characters’ internal states—spinning the camera when a character faints, dissolving into a diffuse smear when another undergoes hypnosis at the hand of the head sun worshiper (Cicely Oates), and blurring the lens to indicate a veil of tears, whereupon a wild close-up of the killer’s gun barrel materializes in the void.