Although Alfred Hitchcock was unhappy with the script and Charles Laughton's performance, still, he experimented on this movie just as he did on The Lady Vanishes (1938). This movie has background music only at the beginning and the end. Hitchcock and Harry Stradling Jr. gave the movie a darker look in order to make it very atmospheric. Stradling later worked with Hitchcock in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and Suspicion (1941). This was the last movie that Alfred Hitchcock made in England before going to Hollywood under contract to producer David O. Selznick. His next film would be Rebecca (1940). This is the last of director Alfred Hitchcock's films in which he made no cameo appearance.
In Cornwall, 1819, a young woman discovers she's living near a gang of criminals who arrange shipwrecks for profit.