A costume drama of cutthroat smugglers on the Cornish coast was an anomaly for Hitchcock. But his last British feature, based on a Daphne du Maurier novel, offers pleasures that are not all camp. Charles Laughton is deliciously overwrought as a hypocritical squire who moonlights as a criminal mastermind. But he knows and we know that, while his character is depraved, he is not mad, as the script would have us believe. Maureen O'Hara's damsel-in-distress is of the Notorious mode: in a house filled with murderers, she slips into the intrigue in such a way as to save not only herself but the supposed agent of her rescue (Robert Newton). Marie Ney as the mistress of the lonely inn is a variation on Hitchcock's beleaguered farmers' wives; she answers for her brutal husband (Leslie Banks) till the bitter end, just as O'Hara's affinity for Laughton offers the film "its dark blossom of lyricism," in Raymond Durgnat's words.