The Child Who Knew Too Much: Liminality in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, 1956)

Abstract

Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much is often noted as being the film that he made twice (1934 and 1956). In popular culture, the title is frequently used as a clever, but trite, pun.1 The song “Que Sera, Sera” from the 1956 version is still popular today, although many listeners are unaware of the song’s filmic origins. Despite mainstream familiarity with these cultural elements, in early academic Hitchcock studies, the two films are casually referenced or missing altogether in the discussion of the Hitchcock canon. In his 1989 revised version of Hitchcock’s Films, Robin Wood acknowledges the passing mention of The Man Who Knew Too Much and attempts to correct this omission in his updated edition; he remarks: I cannot place the 1956 version quite in the front rank of Hitchcock’s movies: the material does not permit the radical critique of patriarchal structures that Hitchcock undertook (whether he knew it or not) in, for example Notorious, Rear Window, and Vertigo, which is what gives those films their profundity, their sense of being at once both profoundly disturbed and profoundly disturbing. They resist all attempts at containment within the ideological status quo; The Man Who Knew Too Much does not. Its project is epitomized in the contrast between its opening and final images: first shot, the couple (James Stewart, Doris Day) separated by their child; last shot, the couple united by their child.2 KeywordsGender RoleAmerican FamilyRear WindowLiminal SpaceChildhood InnocenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.