"It has often been remarked that the Hitchcock `touch' has a little Germanic force behind it. It might even be claimed that Hitchcock was the first non-German director to open up the Anglo-Saxon cinema to Expressionist influence. Which makes the emergence of Mary, the German-language version of his 1930 film Murder!, shot at the same time on the same sets but with a German cast, a fascinating case for study....In many respects it looks a much smoother job of filmmaking than Murder!....But in becoming a tighter movie, it has also become less characteristically Hitchcock. The irony is, looking at Murder!, that some of those characteristics seem precisely what one might call the Expressionist influence. In almost every instance, these feed into the social comedy, the preoccupation with class and style, theatricality and self-presentation, which concerns (the original) film as much as its murder plot and accounts for its rather rambling air....Mary is a neat little potboiler, efficient but rather empty...."-Richard Combs, Sight & Sound