Alfred Hitchcock, by the time he made The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956, was one of only a few directors that could—in Hollywood parlance—“open” a film. Which is to say his name automatically drew the full spectrum of ticket buyers. “There’s a new Hitchcock at the Odeon,” would be a normal comment at dinner tables. He was as big a star as the actors he cast. Bigger, sometimes. The Man Who Knew Too Much was his second pass at material he’d originally filmed in 1934, but for his second swipe he had Technicolor, a wide screen, and frequent collaborator James Stewart in the lead, alongside Doris Day.

It’s the tale of an American surgeon who takes a vacation in Marrakech and is passed a secret message by a dying man. That makes him, wife Doris, and their son, targets in a shadowy international intrigue designed to orchestrate the assassination of a foreign dignitary. The story migrates to London for its second half, where a series of set pieces hurtles viewers toward a climax at the Royal Albert Hall during a packed opera.

We don’t think it’s one of Hitchcock’s best efforts. There are numerous unlikely plot contrivances, and a bit where Dr. Stewart sedates Day before telling her bad news is so discordant today that we don’t know many women who wouldn’t rage at it. But okay, movies age, and sometimes specific aspects don’t age well. We sometimes judge them from our modern perspective, but mainly we focus on their contemporaneous merits—or try to. Hitchcock, a celebrity filmmaker helming his forty-third film and in need of new twists for audiences that had outsize expectations of his suspense mastery, stitches a few tortured sequences into his filmic tapestry.

But the movie has many attractions too. Stewart and Day are pretty solid working with a tricky script. The final sequence and its dependence upon an orchestral cymbal crash to drown out an assassin’s gunshot is unlikely but fun. Several moments of comedy hit the target. The Marrakech

sequences are entertaining to watch. At least they were for us—the medina hasn’t changed in basic character at all. We were easily able to pick out specific buildings we saw just last year. Conversely, London has done nothing but change. There’s historical value in seeing it before it became the skyscraperscape it is today.

We checked a few film websites for rankings of Hitchcock’s fifty-two films. This version of The Man Who Knew Too Much generally sat around fifteen to twenty. Fifteen feels high for us, especially because as a big event movie from the mid-1950s it can feel occasionally overwrought in 2025. We’ll agree with twenty. A filmmaker wants a remake to surpass the original, and it does. Every source we checked agrees on that. But wherever you rank it, Hitchcock is always worth a look. The Man Who Knew Too Much premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in April 1956, and had its official opening in the U.S. today.