21 - The Man Who Knew Too Much

    A man, his wife, and his young son are on vacation.  A man they meet briefly winds up being killed, and in his dying breath, warns the father of an assassination that will take place.  After his son is kidnapped by the conspirators, the husband and wife embark on a mission to unravel the plot and recover their son.
    Another classic Hitchcock that I never watched.  I remember my brother explaining one of the plot scenes, the gunshot timed to the music.  Interestingly, that seemed almost unimportant.  They spell out the use of that well ahead of time.
    This is a little less dark than some of his other work, and it's less circuitous than North by Northwest was.  It doesn't play out like a mystery, but it does have a bit of tension.  The amount of humor seems a little strange though, since some of it defuses some of the other things that bother people, notably, children in peril.  While a child is being held hostage through much of the movie, he isn't in clear jeopardy most of the time.  If they showed the kid being tied in a chair or something, then the humor would seem disrespectful.
    I did like this, but I also felt like Jimmy Stewart was more hotheaded than he usually would be.  In Vertigo, he's a bit impulsive, but that's part of the point of his character.  In this, he just seems a little crabby.
    And I have to say, the one thing that really bugged me about the movie was Doris Day's singing.  I like the song Que Sera, Sera, but the way that she belts out the word "que" really bothered me.