This silent was Alfred Hitchcock's third full-length feature film and will be a must-see event for fans of the legendary director. Its creepy plot, inspired by the Jack the Ripper case, contained many of the themes that would run like a thread through his career in subsequent suspense thrillers. There's the mass of circumstantial evidence placing an innocent man in serious jeopardy, handcuffs as a key prop, and not one but two appearances by Hitch himself - the first time he'd acted as an extra in his own film. Look out for him in a newspaper office scene and again as part of the crowd at the arrest of the main suspect, played by Ivor Novello, a major matinee stage idol of the day, whose casting was quite a coup. But Novello's public image forced Hitch's hand on the film's ending - the same problem occurred with Cary Grant in Suspicion - where the director would have preferred to have left things open and ambiguous. The film was shelved for several months because the producers considered it too gloomy and heavy-handed. But its final release saw it hailed as one of the finest British films ever made - and secured Hitch's reputation at the tender age of 27.

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