In between directing The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca, Hitchcock made this relative dud, a period piece about a den of murderers on the coast of Cornwall in 1800. It's not altogether terrible--the last ten minutes are pretty terrific--but it suffers from a lack of subjectivity, and while it's action-filled, it's very dull.Rumor has it that Charles Laughton, producer and star, hijacked the production away from Hitchcock. It was not a happy experience for Sir Alfred but immediately after directing this, his last British film, he went to work with David O. Selznick and turned another novel by Daphne Du Maurier into one of the greatest movies ever made in the Hollywood system. Win some, lose some.
