"This sinister black comedy of murder accelerates until it becomes a hilarious fantasy of murder; the more macabre and grotesque, the funnier it becomes. When it's over you realize that even the actors have been having a boisterous good time getting themselves knocked off. Alec Guinness is the master criminal of the horrendous gang, and Katie Johnson is the cheerful old lady who upsets their fiendish plans simply by living in a world of her own. As her victims are, in some ways, even less real than she (she is, at least, as real as a good fairy), the disasters that befall them are a mad farce." --Berkeley Cinema Guild