This follows much the same foolproof thriller pattern as The Man Who Knew Too Much and there’s no surprise there, it’s from the same screenwriter, Charles Bennett. Like “The Man Who…”, this was one of the first and oldest Hitchcock movies I saw way back as a teenager doing film studies for A-level, and again I remember being surprised by how good an “old” movie could be. And, again, it’s wonderfully simple in structure.

The film opens with the (at first) seemingly innocuous Mr. Memory’s show where our hero Robert Donat meets a mysterious woman. He takes her home but wakes in the middle of the night to find her murdered, leaving only a note indicating some explanation might be found in Scotland. He takes the train to Scotland – The Flying Scotsman, no less – and after a stopover with a memorable couple in the countryside, finds the man he’s looking for… but rather quickly needs to flee again. He finds his way through a parade to an assembly hall where he’s mistaken for the key speaker, which he fantastically bullsh*ts his way through before being arrested. It’s here we get the most memorable sequence of the movie where Donat is handcuffed to his leading lady Madeleine Carroll. The story finally comes full circle via Scotland Yard to the London Palladium and old Mr. Memory again, resolving the mystery and bringing two lovers together in an extraordinary final shot.

What lifts this (only slightly, I have to say) above its predecessor The Man Who Knew Too Much are the absolutely wonderful character details. When Donat stops over with the couple in the countryside, there’s a whole other story going on between those two, marital unrest, hints of impotence – when the wife gives Donat her husband’s jacket, it’s not just his jacket, it’s his Sunday best. Before this, as Donat sneaks out of his building past agents looking for him, the milkman also gives him a disguise, but not before a roundabout discussion in which basically the milkman doesn’t believe Donat’s story about the murder and the agents but does believe that he’s been having an affair upstairs and the lady’s husband is waiting outside. Later we have the professor’s wife who walks in on him holding a stranger at gunpoint then leaves as if it’s a perfectly natural scenario; and the landlady at the inn’s comments on Donat and Carroll’s closeness (due to being cuffed) when her husband suggests something suspicious might be going on: “I d’no ken and I d’no care, they’re so terrible in love with each other!” And let’s not forget the wonderful two men on the Flying Scotsman discussing ladies undergarments in front of a vicar… like a little trailer for The Lady Vanishes, lol.

This is easily one of Hitchcock’s best, second only for me perhaps to The Lady Vanishes in his British period. On top of the wonderful character humour there are dozens of “proper” directorial touches, most notable perhaps his cutting from a woman discovering that mysterious woman’s body at the start, just as she opens her mouth to scream, to the train’s whistle. Again he works his story towards climaxes at landmarks: the Forth Bridge, the London Palladium. And I daresay that closing moment over Mr. Memory’s final gasps, Donat and Carroll’s hands joining together with the chorus line in the background, is probably among the most moving pieces of cinema he ever shot.