In his first British film,* Joseph Losey turned a low-budget quickie into a fascinating excursion into his own preoccupations with psychoanalysis, with class, with submerged passion, and with the disquieting presence of a strange intruder. Gavin Lambert writes, "There is a splendor about this film, which has one of the most absurdly extravagant plots on record, and never flinches from it. The psychoanalyst (Alexander Knox) who whimsically installs a Soho gunman (Dirk Bogarde) in his home wishes to discover when, or why, his patient's id breaks out. Bogarde's 'sleeping tiger', however, is nothing to that of Alexis Smith as the doctor's wife: hers is a great beast heard growling subterraneously throughout, and, in the fury of frustrated desire, it bounds terrifyingly forth." *The film was signed by the producer, Victor Hanbury, and ghost-written by Harold Buchman and Carl Foreman who, like Losey, were blacklisted American artists.