The Man Who Knew Too Much About Art: The Actor Who Plays The Conductor Is A Movie Legend (And It’s Not Alfred Hitchcock)

Arte tonight broadcasts The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956 version, remake by Alfred Hitchcock The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 version… by Alfred Hitchcock! Hence the self-remake, starring Doris Day and James Stewart and a cameo appearance by a Hollywood legend! But you should know this.

The Man Who Knew Too Much tells the story of how a couple by Ben and Joe McKenna, initially on vacation, find themselves involved in a plot to assassinate a foreign statesman. From now on we try to blackmail them by kidnapping their son Hank. The climax of the film takes place in a crowded opera house. The orchestra must present a performance in the presence of the entire elite of London. A performance that will go wrong.

Who is this mysterious conductor?

The conductor arrives to loud applause from the crowd before the panicked look of Joe (Day), who knows that the murder is about to happen during the concert and just in time for the fatal cymbal drop. At the same time, Ben (Stewart) is looking for a murderer in the balcony lockers! But Hitchcock plays on our nerves and prefers to film the conductor at work, a musician he knows well!

That person is none other than Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock’s official composer, with whom he worked on nine feature films, Who Killed Harry? (1955) to Torn Curtain (1966). Also in 1956, he also made a brief appearance in another Hitchcock of the year, The False Guilty, alongside Henry Fonda and Vera Miles. These are his only two screen appearances.

He started with Citizen Kane

Despite his many collaborations with the master of suspense, including the famous Psycho, it was for others that Herman won his two Oscars. He, who got his start in cinema in 1941 by signing the Citizen Kane soundtrack – Excuse Me, won his first Oscar the same year for William Dieterle’s All the Goods of the Earth, and then for his second feature: Martin’s Taxi Driver. Scorsese and obsessed Brian De Palma.

In the meantime, he will work on films that have become classics, such as The House in the Shadows, The Adventures of Mrs. Murry, The Devil’s Garden, The Kentucky Man, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad or Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Hitchcock became angry with him in 1966, accusing him of not following his instructions on The Ton Curtain. A disappointed director would never work with him again. “Que sera, sera” as they say. (“What will be, will be…”).