Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

The first [version of The Man Who Knew Too Much] is faster, more irrational and sports a poetic flair for the bizarre.
---Raymond Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (Faber and Faber Limited, 1974)

The conjunction of music and murder is one of Hitchcock's many ways of showing that evil lurks very near the surface of respectability.
--Elisabeth Weis, The Silent Scream (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 1982)

The current series of  Hitchcock films on Turner Classic Movies gives one a chance to compare his early work in England with the later work in America; The Man Who Knew Too Much was made in England in 1934 and re-made in America in 1956.  When I was younger I thought of Hitchcock's English films as genteel trivia, certainly in comparison with the later American ones.  After watching much of Hitchcock's work again recently I see things as much more complicated:  the English films of the thirties as an attempt to deal with the anxieties and insecurities of the coming war, the American films an attempt to undermine the complacency of America in the fifties. 

There are four set-pieces in the 1934 (shorter) version:  a quiet murder in a nightclub in Switzerland, a fight with chairs in a church (for sun worshippers!), an attempted murder at a concert in Albert Hall and an extended shootout with police at the assassins' hideout (based on an actual shootout with anarchists in 1911 and cinematically influenced by Howard Hawks's 1931 Scarface).  As usual Hitchcock overcomes the many challenges of his relatively low budget, including the outstanding use of the Schufftan special mirror effects (named after its inventor) to shoot the Albert Hall scene, which includes an attempt to recover a kidnapped young girl and prevent a political assassination.  It is another common Hitchcock theme:  ordinary people in an extraordinary situation, in this case with sinister characters using a dentist's office and a church as fronts.