By far my favourite pre-Hollywood Hitchcock, this one has nearly all the characteristic elements, the tangled plot that seems for a moment about to get clarified only to reveal another level of complication, the thread of humour running through even the most menacing episodes, the mysterious and assumed identities, the shadows. A well-dressed man (John Stuart) enters an empty house, where he encounters Ben, an amusing cockney drifter (Leon M. Lion), and then a corpse, and then a pretty girl from the house next door (Ann Casson) falls through the skylight, the corpse disappears, several bad guys show up on the doorsteps with Nora, a lovely deaf-mute woman (Ann Grey), and the advantage keeps shifting. There's something about a necklace, and another bad guythe one who wasn't really deadhas it, but Ben picks his pocket. All the bad guys have a sort of railway ticket as an identifying sign. They're planning to take the boat train to Europe with the diamonds, and the first man misses the train, and commandeers a bus which careens across the countryside, past an inn with a sign "Dainty Teas." The train scenes are incredibly active and suspenseful, and the advantage keeps shifting. The deaf-mute is neither. None of the bad guys has the necklace. They identify one of their group as the detective Barton and chase him; he gets away but the bad guys accidentally kill the fireman and engineer and the train crashes spectacularly into the ferry. The first man saves the formerly deaf-mute woman, the supposed policeman grills the woman and the first man, who laughs and calls him by namein fact, he's been the detective Barton all along, funny that the crook he was chasing chose his identity to hide with. And Ben reveals, grinning his idiot grin, that he still has the necklace. Some might say the difficulty in following the plot is a failing, but I think it's deliberately confusing. Hitchcock plays with his audience, teasing us into thinking we know what's happening and then turning the tables on us. The story starts in the middle of events, and it isn't until the very last minutes of the movie that the pattern begins to make sense.
