“Stage Fright... is a Hitchcock film that is greatly underrated. With Murder! it is one of the works in which theater, always a preoccupation, becomes an explicit subject. Yet Stage Fright presents its central philosophical arguments about film and theater with subtlety and complex irony, as it presents its characters and the events of its narrative. Few Hitchcock films are studded with as many traps for the unwary viewer or critic who thinks it is child's play to penetrate the author's thinking. It is a film that can give the impression of having been put together casually, but is one of Hitchcock's most carefully composed and crafted works.” --William Rothman