Metacritic reviews

The Man Who Knew Too Much finds the director firmly back in his wheelhouse, extracting all the wit and suspense he can from a pulpy exercise in abduction and conspiracy.

Alfred Hitchcock's direction, in which the story is told in sharp, abbreviated sequences gathering speed steadily toward their explosive climax, makes The Man Who Knew Too Much one of the neatest melodramas of the year.

Director Alfred Hitchcock, who would remake the movie in 1956 with James Stewart, invests each scene with a blithe sense of fun.

An unusually fine dramatic story handled excellently from a production standpoint. Built along gangster lines, but from an international crook standpoint, with a lot of melodramatic suspense added.

This is a suberbly structured thriller whose excellence is aided and abetted by a spirited cast.

Produced in England in 1934, The Man Who Knew Too Much was perhaps the first of Alfred Hitchcock’s films to openly attempt the autonomously cinematic, aggressively syntactic perfection with which he would later become synonymous.

It is in this film that Hitchcock showed his development of a theme he would repeat in films to come--the innocent victim suddenly caught up in a terrifying situation with apparently no way out, coupled with breathless chases in popular public places.

The film is notable as the first English-language role of Peter Lorre, who is creepily appealing as the leader of the conspiracy. [03 Feb 2013, p.Q19]

Although the film is fast and consistently clever, it is more deeply flawed than any other Hitchcock film of the period, failing to find a thematic connection between its imaginative set pieces.

Although the photography and lighting are inferior according to Hollywood standards, the film is an interesting example of technical ingenuity as well as an absorbing melodrama.