A vacationing couple in Switzerland is whisked back home, swept into a political assassination scheme and a search for their kidnapped child — a characteristic Hitchcock notion about the little surprises that can quicken the heartbeat of middle-class normalcy. So characteristic, in fact, that Hitchcock made the same movie again, twenty years later. The Expressionistic original is a movie of studied contrasts (the bright Alpine resort and dark back-street London slums; the cheerful farce of an unraveling sweater and lightning-bolt shock of a bullet hole in a picture window), and it is cruder in most other ways, too, than the glossy remake. Feminists, at least, may prefer the cool, crack-shot Edna Best to the "Que Sera, Sera" Doris Day. (1934) — Duncan Shepherd