Word: pilbeam
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...Much, Secret Agent). Last year, flushed with cinema success and much hearty beef-eating, Director Hitchcock decided to try one of his thrillers against the placid background of the English countryside. Said he: "I want to commit murder amid babbling brooks." The result teams 18-year-old Nova Pilbeam and Play Actor Derrick de Marney in a melodramatic hodge-podge that lacks the vivid outlines and clear characterizations of previous Hitchcock films, but is, nevertheless, a fair sample of Hitchcock devices...
...hardly necessary to recite the mad plot of "The Man Who Knew Too Much"; for at least a year it has been incorporated into our modern folk-lore. Leslie Banks is fine as one of the harassed, trouble-seeking parents, and Nova Pilbeam, since grown to royal stature in "Nine Days a Queen" is credible as the kidnapped child. And of course Peter Lorre, as the ringleader of the ugliest gang over collected within the walls of one studio, contributes that famous characterization of controlled deadly ferocity...
...Gaumont-British has done a creditable job, and undertaken, with measurable success, the difficult task of reanimating scenes from the past. Nova Pilbeam, the new GB star who plays the part of Lady Jane, may not be a finished actress, but she has a quaint, old-fashioned charm which seems eminently suitable. Cordie Hardwicke, as the ambitious, cold-blooded Warwick, makes an evil geni of convincing unamiability. The supporting cast is of high calibre, thus insuring against any let-down in the minor, transitional scenes...
...royal acrimony is Warwick (Cedric Hardwicke), "a man without conscience and without fear," who becomes the power behind the new throne. He does this by setting his rivals at sword's point until they have obliged him by eliminating each other. Thereupon he marries Lady Jane Grey (Nova Pilbeam) to his son and has her crowned. Nine days later Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's daughter, storms into London with the northern counties at her back and ends upon the scaffold Warwick's cloudy dreaming and the brief, pitiable queenship of his daughter...
Based on a story by Charles Bennett and D. B. Wyndham Lewis, The Man Who Knew Too Much starts calmly enough in St. Moritz where Lawrence (Leslie Banks), his wife (Edna Best) and their small daughter (Nova Pilbeam) are performing winter sports. A fellow guest at their hotel is mysteriously shot. Dying, he begs Lawrence to find a code message in his room, deliver it to the British Foreign Office. Lawrence finds the message but before he can deliver it, the assassins have kidnapped his daughter, threatened to kill her if Lawrence carries out his mission...