Analysis Of The Film 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'

In the film Hitchcock showed an American family’s unexpected encounter with the darkest side of European power struggles and a horrid personal misfortune that ensues. In the narrative space of the film we find the tongue-tied exasperations of Ben McKenna, Jo Conway’s frustrations both as a mother who lost her child and a Broadway performer who has lost her career and the kidnapped child Hank’s wide-eyed astonishment at the nefarious spectacles opening around him-all this brilliantly formalizes Hitchcock’s own encounter both with America and with the possibilities of cinema. (Pomerance 17). The ending of the film is based on a true life occurrence and the incident took place around 1910 known as Sidney Street siege (Truffaut 90). In the last

A critical historian have complained about the educational system of America in the 1960s saying that “ours is the only educational system in the world vital segments of which have fallen into the hands of people who joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identity with children who show the least intellectual promise” (Hofstandter 51). General atmosphere in America when Hitchcock filmed The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) was the time when Nicholas Ray’s classic tale of adolescent angst A Rebel Without a Cause (1955) came out and it was a time when child was upheld as a principal family value, principal focus of interest and concern. From this the film can be seen as a portrayal on the American family dynamic, viewed from the perspective of two loving but slightly incompatible/conflicting adults who raises a precocious/gifted little boy but the narrative “centred essentially on the anxiety-ridden father, a man panicked about the way he looks to his wife and to the eyes of the world” (Pomerance 82-83). The central issue most explored here is the complex relationship between Ben and Jo, the delicate state of her emotional health and how a man who thinks he knows so much must learn the contours of his own interrelationship with others. Ben, a man who has glorified in knowing everything is robbed of his self-importance and significance as the head of the family. Here the family is saved and revived by a mother’s quiet courage, and in the final image Hank is happily and safely repositioned between his parents. The lyrics “Que Sera Sera” have rightly come to stand for the American family sentiments of “We’ll love Again” (Spoto