Marrakech on Screen: Hitchcock, Le Carré and the Hotels Behind Two Spy Stories

Marrakech has been seducing film crews since the 1950s, and spy stories in particular, perhaps because a city of walled gardens and hidden courtyards is a natural place to keep secrets. Three of its great hotels have played major roles.

La Mamounia: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

Alfred Hitchcock remade his own 1934 thriller with James Stewart and Doris Day as an American couple on holiday in Morocco who stumble onto an assassination plot, and whose son is kidnapped to keep them quiet. They stay at La Mamounia, set in 20 acres of gardens just inside the old city walls, which had opened in 1923. Doris Day's "Que Sera, Sera" won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became her signature.

Winston Churchill called the Mamounia's gardens one of the loveliest spots in the world, painted them, and has a suite named after him. Sixty years after Hitchcock, the hotel appeared in another spy story, Our Kind of Traitor (below).

Royal Mansour: Our Kind of Traitor (2016)

In this John le Carré adaptation, Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris play a British couple on holiday in Marrakech who befriend a Russian money-launderer, played by Stellan Skarsgård, who wants to defect. McGregor's character stays at the Royal Mansour, a hotel of private riads built by Morocco's king. The production needed special permission from the king himself to film there. La Mamounia also features in the film.

Es Saadi Marrakech Resort: The Night Manager (Season 1)

The first episode of The Night Manager opens in Cairo during the Arab Spring, where Tom Hiddleston's Jonathan Pine is night manager of the Nefertiti Hotel. The Nefertiti is actually the Es Saadi Marrakech Resort, the garden resort in the Hivernage district with one of the city's largest pools and spas, which has hosted the Rolling Stones and Princess Margaret. Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman all won Golden Globes for the series.