A score by the great Georges Auric nags and needles, but Dickinson is also at home to eerie silences. Walbrook does something bleaker and frostier with his chiselled good looks than he later managed for Powell in The Red Shoes.

The visual style is baroque horror noir (lots of tilted camera angles), and the central performance from Anton Walbrook as the desperate Captain Herman positively buzzes with pressure-cooker intensity.

The story develops a morbidly exciting grip thanks to the maniacally superstitious Walbrook and Evans's otherworldly chill -- the funeral scene alone will make you jump.

Although it would be invidious to slight the multiple skills that organized the complex wonders... it must be allowed that their manifold efforts would have missed fruition without the compelling performances of Anton Walbrook and Edith Evans.