The fifth of the celebrated 1930s ‘thriller sextet’, this is the last to be written by Charles Bennett before he left for Hollywood, and the only one without an overt political dimension, as distinct from sexual politics: a young woman defies the Law, embodied by her police-chief father, to take the side of another in the line of falsely-accused heroes.

The label ‘odyssey’, attached to it by the BFI, is stretching it somewhat, since the action is confined to a small area of Southern England, but the couple’s journey to evade the police and track down the real murderer takes them through a colourful cross-section of the British class system, from doss house to upmarket hotel – a climactic location which Hitchcock exploits for an unforgettably spectacular lengthy camera movement. Worth seeing for that alone, but of course there is much more.

This film is screening as part of The Genius of Hitchcock: Part Three (February 2nd – 27th), which is part of a complete retrospective of the filmmaker’s work running until March 2013.