Why did Alfred Hitchcock make the same movie twice?
Alfred Hitchcock is known as being one of the most innovative filmmakers of all time, pioneering the mechanisms and pace of suspense, laying the groundwork for slasher horror, and helping to invent the dolly zoom. Although he followed several distinct patterns at different stages in his career, he brought something new to the table with almost every film. The one big caveat is the one he made twice — The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Many filmmakers end up being dissatisfied with their work. Often, it’s because they don’t get the final cut. David Lynch famously fell foul of the pitfall when he made Dune, as did Ridley Scott when he made Blade Runner. Francis Ford Coppola is known for tinkering with his films incessantly, releasing new versions of The Godfather Part 3 and Apocalypse Now decades after they won Oscars. However, there aren’t many directors who go to the hassle of remaking one of their movies. Finding the financial backing alone would be a headache.
However, in 1956, Hitchcock released The Man Who Knew Too Much more than two decades after releasing The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934. He made the first film when he was still working in England. It follows a British couple, played by Leslie Banks and Edna Best, who are vacationing with their daughter in Switzerland and become embroiled in international espionage when a Frenchman named Louis Bernard passes along an explosive secret while dying. Their daughter gets kidnapped, and they have to track her down while avoiding the criminals Bernard warned them about.
By many estimations, the 1934 version is one of Hitchcock’s best British films, and the director himself had no issues with it. It was producer David O Selznick who bought the rights to the film in 1941 and asked Hitchcock, who had recently relocated to Hollywood and earned his first Oscar nomination for 1940’s Rebecca, to create an American version. More than a decade later, however, he was more open to the idea.
The 1950s saw Hitchcock change his style considerably, swapping out the moody tones of black and white for the saturated hues of Technicolor. The 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much had a significantly bigger budget, a full colour palette, and two major movie stars, Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, giving Hitch scope to do something completely different.
Since he hadn’t sought to remake his own movie and was only doing it at Paramount’s behest, he wanted to make it as distinct as possible from the original. He started out by hiring screenwriter John Michael Hayes to pen the script. Hayes was a major player in Hitchcock’s cinematic style in the 1950s, having written Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and The Trouble with Harry. The director didn’t want him rewriting the 1934 script, so he forbade him from even reading it, providing only a few bits of the story that he wanted to incorporate into the new version.
In the 1956 film, Stewart and Day play a married American couple vacationing with their son in French Morocco who, as in the original, become embroiled in international espionage when a Frenchman named Louis Bernard passes along an explosive secret while dying. Their son is also kidnapped, and they have to track him down while Day sings the Oscar-winning song ‘Que Sera Sera.’
Although the plots are similar, the tone of the films is entirely different. The first version is 75 minutes — tightly wound, sharply paced, and less focused on the scenery. The second is nearly 45 minutes longer, takes time for a musical interlude, and uses the landscape of Morocco to full effect. Interestingly, the first film also features a much stronger female role for the part of the wife. Best’s character is a renowned sharpshooter whose skills come in handy during the final action sequence. Meanwhile, her husband is literally sidelined.
When François Truffaut told Hitchcock that he believed that the second film was superior to the first in some ways, the director said, “Let’s say the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.” For many Hitchcock fans, though, both films are so distinct and well-made that they deserve to be admired separately.
