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The 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the only film Alfred Hitchcock ever revisited, elucidates what is perhaps a unique gesture of solidarity and sympathy with the social status of the American woman as wife and mother in the 1950s. The key to understanding this film lies not in the dialogue, exotic locations, lush color picture, or even Hitchcock’s signature camera work. Rather, the deliberate choices Hitchcock made regarding the employment of diegetic music in the film may reveal his feelings toward the role of women in the middle of the 1950s. Discussion of the representational nature exhibited in this film, connections between music and femininity, and dissection of the dramatic action’s interplay with the diegetic music (particularly the song “We’ll Love Again”) suggest that Hitchcock recognized the benefits of gender equality, in rights and responsibilities, as the basis for a more diverse, enriched, and enriching society.

While Herrmann's twenty-four successful and one failed collaboration with Hitchcock – including films and television programs – featured compositional scoring to some degree, Herrmann's work on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) is a peculiar deviation in the pattern of their regular working relationship because there are only a very small number of composed cues. The bulk of Herrmann's work on this film, which involved some considerable legal machinations, consisted of two very different kinds of contribution, each of which can tell us something about the composer's talents, diligence, and sensitivity to film production. On one hand he was called upon to arrange "received" music, and this in a wide range from Moroccan folk tunes to elaborate symphonic work, and including the traditionalist hymn, "The Portents." On the other, he became a member of the cast, on this one occasion only in his filmic work with Hitchcock, playing the role of a conductor at a performance in the Royal Albert Hall. This chapter argues that, since the overall score of the film is essentially an acoustic quilt, we find here evidence of a talent for assemblage and backgrounding that Herrmann does not have opportunity to show in his other work with Hitchcock.

The remake of Hitchcock’s 1934 film retained the title and certain key elements of the original, in which the child of a vacationing couple is kidnapped, including the climactic assassination attempt in Albert Hall. But the details of the story changed a great deal. The vacationing couple is American, not English, the kidnapped child is a boy, not a girl, and the wife, played by Doris Day, is a retired musical star rather than an expert marksman. The Production Code office, which had excised five minutes of a climactic gun battle from the original, had relatively few objections to the remake. Censors objected to the kidnapping of a young child, the suggestion that the child’s life might be in danger, and wanted to make it clear that the villain was only ‘posing’ as a minister, not actually a man of the cloth. Hitchcock easily accommodated these suggestions by raising the age of the child to eight and adjusting a few bits of dialogue, reflecting both the gradual weakening of the Code and the director’s increasing skill in dealing with censorship.

This chapter examines the seven thrillers created by Hitchcock in Britain just before he left for America: The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, The Lady Vanishes, and Jamaica Inn. These thrillers established his international reputation and helped build a demand for his services among American studios. The chapter explores the influence of the British Board of Film Censors on these films as well as the reaction of the Production Code Administration, which reviewed each of the films in the light of its own criteria before permitting US distribution. At first, American censors simply scissored ‘objectionable’ scenes, but toward the end of Hitchcock’s British tenure, they involved themselves in decisions made at every stage of the production process.