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Later, while shaving and listening to Tristan and Isolde on the wireless, Sir John has an interior monologue about the case (voiceover was a daring new idea in 1930) which blends with the Wagner (performed by an offset orchestra) to become a singspiel aria that leads to a character turning point. Hitchcock regretted the loss of some of the purely visual aspects of silent cinema, and is as concerned with inventive pictures as sound effects. In the strange climax, the camera is fixed up on a trapeze with the guilt-ridden killer, the background blurring behind him as he swings through the air. Then, flash-images of the innocent heroine appear to him and he chooses to hang himself in the Big Top as the climax of his act (Hitch cuts in a reaction shot from a horrified clown).



The plot is derived from Enter Sir John, a novel by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, and is astonishingly wayward, though it keeps pressing buttons that must have excited the young auteur: murder in a theatrical setting (we stay in the wings, Noises Off-fashion, as policemen interview a clutch of witnesses who keep having to dash or stagger onstage to do their bits), an innocent accused who is also a slender female in bondage, odd bits of class consciousness centering on the titled hero, audiences flocking to lurid spectacles, a killer with a broken mind who dresses up as a woman (and also, almost as significantly, a police constable).

It even has an array of eccentric supporting actors (Miles Mander, Una O'Connor, Donald Calthrop). What it lacks is unity -- there's a disconnect between the investigator and the crook, who are doubled by virtue of their profession and love for the same woman, but don't function as alter egos in the way the antagonists of, say, Strangers on a Train or Notorious do. Hitchcock also has less interest in the plight of an unjustly accused person who is in custody rather than on the run.

Sir John acquires a pair of assistants, in the vaudevillian Markhams (Phyllis Konstam, Edward Chapman), but the team generates little heat and the investigation scheme, calling Fane in to audition for a play Sir John has written about the case in which the murder is reconstructed, is almost as lunatic as the one in Hamlet.



It's as if the film were see-sawing between the minor and the experimental. After the suicide, it simply gives up: the plot resolution comes patly when Sir John reads aloud Fane's final note-cum-confession, though it seems odd that the culprit should be so playful (and ambiguous) in a document which ought at least in part be designed to exonerate the heroine (he couches his confession as an acceptance of the part in Sir John's play).

After this, the film slightly redeems itself with a clever final shot in which the lovers clinch -- not in real life (thugh they do in an alternate ending) but on stage as they co-star in a play.

It's often said that The Man Who Knew Too Much was the only film Hitchcock made twice: actually, he remade Murder! instantly as Mary, a much-shorter German version shot on the same sets, with Alfred Abel replacing Marshall, Olga Tschechowa as the renamed heroine and Ekkegard Arendt as the killer.