"PFA audiences already know director Woods from his wonderful They Drive By Night (PFA 5/86) of the prior year. A superb stylist in the Lang and Hitchcock tradition, he undoubtedly would have been a major British director of the forties but for his untimely death early in the war. The Nursemaid Who Disappeared is a beautifully constructed thriller from a Philip Macdonald novel about a kidnapping plot that is thwarted with a shopping list and a used bus ticket as the only clues. It was remade (well) much later as 23 Paces to Baker Street, retaining its basic plot but changing the whole emphasis by making the investigator a blind (and therefore vulnerable) playwright. Both versions are good, but the original, with its roots more firmly grounded in traditional detective narrative, is the more satisfying. Apart from real vitality in its action sequences, the film has an added bonus (in) the way it reflects the mores-and events-of the time, and poignancy in that its many London street location sequences frequently pick up newspaper boardings assuring us that the war crisis is over and that Hitler wants only peace!" William K. Everson