Pierre Fresnay

An ordinary British couple vacationing in Switzerland suddenly find themselves embroiled in a case of international intrigue when their daughter is kidnapped by spies plotting a political assassination. This fleet and gripping early thriller from the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, was the first film the director made after signing to the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation.

A mysterious writer of poison pen letters, known only as Le Corbeau, plagues a French provincial town, unwittingly exposing the collective suspicion and rancor seething beneath the community's calm surface. Brilliantly captures the spirit of paranoid pettiness and self-loathing turning an ccupied French town into a twentieth-century Salem style witch-hunt.

"Married couple Bob and Jill Lawrence are vacationing in Switzerland with daughter Betty. A Frenchman who befriends the family is shot through the heart during a dance with the young mother. Before dying, however, he whispers a secret... What follows is an unusually fine dramatic story, filled with hallmark Hitchcockian twists and turns, breathless chase scenes and superb acting."-container.