We just lost singer/actress/legend Doris Day.
In addition to everything else that's being written about her, she should also be remembered as the woman who embraced an AIDS-stricken Rock Hudson at a time when people thought that would kill you.
But what I really want to explore is how Alfred Hitchcock hobbled his remake of "The Man Who Knew Too Much" by casting Day as the titular man's wife (through no fault of hers).
She was a major motion picture star at the time so I see why he cast her, but in doing so, he watered down the suspense of the film.
Let me explain.
Here's the plot and (spoiler) the ending of both films: An American couple and their child is on vacation in some exotic foreign location. It is established early on that the woman has a latent talent that the husband made her give up in favor of being a homemaker.
Their child gets kidnapped and though the father spends the whole movie tracking down the kidnappers, it's the wife's latent talent that saves the day.
So far so good.
In Hitchcock's original version, the wife is an Olympic trap shooter. This brings an exciting ending when the kidnapper is holding her child at gunpoint on the roof of a building and the mother, on the street looking up in horror, steals a police officer's rifle and after a suspensefully long wait she lines up her shot ... and shoots the kidnapper dead.
Wow!
In the remake, Doris Day is a retired singer. At the end, the couple are in the home of the kidnappers while a big society party is going on. They know their child is in the house, so Doris sits at the piano, sings "Que Sera Sera," her signature song, and the little boy hears her voice and joins them in the living room.
How is that suspenseful?
Doris Day was many wonderful things. But she was not a badass.
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