Review Detail

This is a tricky one... I have to say I didn't really enjoy the film all that much (all the reasons why here: https://letterboxd.com/film/the-man-who-knew-too-much-1956/) but that's no fault of the editor, so I don't want to knock the "Enjoyment" score too much. In fact, all of the removals here only served to increase my enjoyment of an otherwise almost forgettable film. I would actually say that the biggest weak point is simply that it's not a MORE aggressive edit. There are definitely some poor attempts at humor that can still be removed, as well as several shots that repeat too much, for example Stewart trying to sit comfortably at a Moroccan dinner, the number of doors he tries in the Albert Hall sequence, the number of shots of Day looking anguished. It would be a much trickier task to edit the audio there though, I admit.

Compared to the original film, deleting the cheesy acting of the kid, some of the cheesy humor and so on was much appreciated. The audio replacement actually might have been a little TOO clean and too jarring for me. The original actually mostly sounds pretty good, and I appreciate the charm of a bit of distortion in old films, since the picture isn't crystal clear either. Technically the A/V edits were fantastic. I only noticed a couple of them, one about 10 minutes in, and another were a scene was trimmed maybe 20 minutes in. But if I didn't know this as an edit and wasn't looking for them, they wouldn't have been noticeable.

All in all, if you've got this on a shelf in a Hitchcock box set, I'd watch this version instead of that. If you haven't re-watched this in a while, I don't think the edits here are significant enough to turn a lackluster film into a really enjoyable re-watch. But if you're a huge Hitchcock fan, the small improvements may provide an enjoyable re-visit.