Hitchcock's return to Covent Garden, 'wrong man' plotting, the neuroses of sexual immaturity, and black-humoured slapstick ironies, tied up neatly in Anthony Shaffer's screenplay from the novel by Arthur Le Bern about the panic wrought by the 'necktie murderer', and glossed with the usual quota of stand-out sequences: the camera's descending recoil from a murderer's first-floor flat; a grisly wrestling match with a corpse in a lorry-load of potatoes; the inspector's mealtimes (almost a reverse homage to Chabrol); the one extended, disturbing seduction/rape/murder scene. A series of variations on themes of excess, surplus and waste from the most fastidious of directors.
