Young and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1937)

If Alfred Hitchcock hadn't made The 39 Steps (1935) before Young and Innocent, the latter film might be taken for a somewhat less tightly plotted and certainly less well-cast sketch for the earlier one. Instead of Robert Donat as the man wrongly accused of murder on the run with Madeleine Carroll as his reluctant accomplice, we get the considerably lower-wattage Derrick De Marney and Nova Pilbeam. Young and Innocent (released in America as The Girl Was Young) feels almost like a retread, in which Hitchcock is trying out a few things that he'll use with more finesse in later films but isn't concerned with much in the way of plausibility and motivation. There is, for example, the focus on the hands when Erica Burgoyne (Pilbeam) is trapped in a car that's sliding into a sinkhole, and Robert Tisdall (De Marney) reaches out to grasp her. We'll see it again with variations in Saboteur (1942) and North by Northwest (1959), but there with more integration into the plot; here the sinking car seems to be only a gimmick introduced to allow Hitchcock to play with suspense-building techniques. There's also a long tracking crane shot that gradually focuses in on the villain (George Curzon) with a give-away tic that anticipates the tracking shot in Notorious (1946) that ends up on the key in Ingrid Bergman's hand. Hitchcock also uses Young and Innocent to exploit his well-known fear of the police, this time by mocking them, as when two cops are forced to hitch a ride with a farmer hauling livestock in his cart: When they complain about how crowded the cart is, the farmer tells them it was only built for ten pigs. Otherwise, Young and Innocent is agreeably nonchalant about plot essentials: Why was Tisdall mentioned in the murdered woman's will? Why did everyone assume that when he ran for help after discovering her body he was actually fleeing the scene of the crime? Why does he flee from the courtroom instead of sticking around to plead his case? Why does Erica so swiftly believe in his innocence? The film is nonsense, but it's enjoyable nonsense if you turn off such questions and go along for the ride. The screenplay, loosely based on a novel by Josephine Tey, is credited to Charles Bennett, Edwin Greenwood, and Anthony Armstrong, but I suspect it was much reworked by Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, who is credited with "continuity," to allow for the director's experiments in suspense.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934)

Peter Lorre, Leslie Banks, and Nova Pilbeam in The Man Who Knew Too Much

The first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which he remade in 1956, was Alfred Hitchcock's breakthrough film, a critical and popular success that also established Peter Lorre as in international star. It was Lorre's first English-language film; in 1933 he had left Germany, where he had made his reputation in M (Fritz Lang, 1931), because of the rise of the Nazis. He is said to have learned his role in Hitchcock's film phonetically. His performance is perhaps the most memorable thing about The Man Who Knew Too Much, which sometimes feels slack and disjointed, as if Hitchcock hadn't yet mastered the technique of seeing the film as a whole. Hitchcock told François Truffaut, "The first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional." Lorre plays Abbott, the mastermind of a group of radicals who are plotting the assassination of the leader of a European country -- the politics are the film's MacGuffin, a vague motive that spurs the action. When Bob Lawrence (Leslie Banks) accidentally learns of the plot, his daughter (Nova Pilbeam) is kidnapped to prevent him from going to the police, but his wife (Edna Best) manages to foil the assassination by screaming when she spots the killer at the point in a concert at the Royal Albert Hall when a cymbal crash is supposed to cover the sound of the gun. Even so, there's a lot of action left as Lawrence frantically tries to rescue his daughter while the police shoot it out with the bad guys. Banks and Best are a rather pallid couple -- he's given to "stiff upper lip, old girl" exhortations, and although she's a champion sharpshooter who fires the shot that kills the assassin, she has little to do the rest of the time but dither and emit that crucial scream -- so it's no wonder that Lorre steals the film.