The Director Who Knew Himself: Remaking the Romance in The Man Who Knew Too Much

Abstract

The Director Who Knew Himself:Remaking the Romance in The Man Who Knew Too Much Matthew Bolton (bio) Alfred Hitchcock's reputation as an auteur with a consistent interest in specific themes, techniques, aesthetics, and narrative structures is well known to anyone with even a passing knowledge of film history. His long shadow stretches across the twentieth century, with early British films like The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), classics from his American era like Rebecca (1940) and Strangers on a Train (1951), and universally recognized masterpieces like Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963) all bearing the distinctive mark of Hitchcock's artistry, persona, and brand. As Thomas Leitch has pointed out, however, an auteurist understanding of Hitchcock as a sui generis genius is undermined by the fact that the majority of his films—including each of those mentioned above—are adaptations of preexisting source material, not original cinematic works. For Leitch, Hitchcock's reputation is built as much on his "unquestioned success in casting himself as the auteur of his films" as it is on his unquestionable talent as a filmmaker.1 Hitchcock's capacity to "eclips[e] authors whose claim to authority was simply less powerful" than his own should be central, Leitch argues, to our understanding of Hitchcock—and other auteurs like Stanley Kubrick and Walt Disney—as a filmmaker whose success was founded on the adaptation of other narrative works.2 Thus Hitchcock's auteur status—and the implication of originality that goes [End Page 165] along with it—seems in tension with a filmography filled with adaptations. One wonders, then, what would happen if Hitchcock had attempted to adapt the work of someone with the same cultural cachet and universal recognition as himself. As it happens, we don't have to wonder. Hitchcock gave us the perfect test case in 1956 when he remade his film The Man Who Knew Too Much from source material he was intimately familiar with: his own 1934 film of the same name.3 By engaging in that most rare case of adaptation, a filmmaker remaking his or her own film, Hitchcock gives viewers a chance to explore not only his adaptation strategies but also his understanding of what a Hitchcock film was and how it had developed in the intervening two decades, years that brought him international fame and fortune, a string of massive commercial and aesthetic successes, and a move from Britain to Hollywood. Further, the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much also falls at an especially important moment in Hitchcock's career, just before he takes a turn from the lightly comic adventure films of the 1940s and early 1950s—Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train, and Rear Window (1954)—to the cynical irony and apocalyptic visions he is perhaps best known for, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie (1964). Theoretical Approaches to Hitchcock and Remakes Of course, considering Hitchcock as an adapter and a remaker opens up a variety of theoretical questions, particularly in terms of what precisely we mean by "remake." The taxonomies developed by remake theorists, while productive and useful in most scenarios, are of little help here, in part because the case of a filmmaker remaking his or her own work—autocitation, using Robert Stam's expansion of Gerard Genette's broad category of intertextuality—is too rare to be anything more than an unusual exception to these theoretical frameworks.4 (Indeed, The Man Who Knew Too Much is one of the only examples often cited, along with George Sluizer's The Vanishing [1988/1993].) However, this [End Page 166] also makes The Man Who Knew Too Much an interesting limit case for the field of remake and adaptation studies as a whole. If, as Catherine Grant has it, we can expect that "film auteurs … make aspects of [earlier] texts their own, over-writing them with their own traceable signatures, perhaps reconfiguring them by incorporating references to other (rewritten) intertexts," then what do we find in these rare cases when the earlier texts are their own?5 Commentators examining The Man Who Knew Too Much as a remake generally fall into one of two...