Film

Jamaica Inn

Name: Jamaica Inn
Genre: Crime, Adventure
Released: 1939
Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Robert Newton, Leslie Banks, Marie Ney

Other titles called Jamaica Inn: the 2014 series (BBC One).

Hitchcock's 1939 Cornish thriller casts Charles Laughton as a sinister innkeeper harboring shipwreck salvagers. Dark, atmospheric, and handsomely shot, it's a period crime picture that trades Hitchcock's usual urbane suspense for Gothic moor-and-fog menace. For fans of atmospheric crime and classical British cinema.

TMDb rating

3.1

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love Hitchcock-era gothic suspense, with fog-bound moors, a hooded villain's menace and a heroine who keeps her nerve while everyone around her lies.

Skip it if you want brisk modern pacing or sharp realism, since this 1939 studio picture is stagey, melodramatic in its performances, and takes its time setting up its dread.

What it asks of you: About a hundred minutes of patient, atmospheric build-up, with a dark mood and a steady rhythm that rewards close attention to faces, weather and whispered suspicion rather than constant action.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Rebecca1940

Another Hitchcock Gothic featuring a heroine isolated in a grand, sinister house with dangerous secrets. Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine deliver masterful performances in this essential psychological thriller.

But It's slow by modern standards, and some viewers find the heroine passive compared to contemporary female characters.

The 39 Steps1935

Hitchcock's earlier, lighter masterpiece about an innocent man on the run across Scotland. It moves like quicksilver and introduced the template for decades of chase thrillers.

But It's briefer and breezier than Jamaica Inn—if you want Gothic dread rather than kinetic fun, this won't scratch the same itch.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog1927

Hitchcock's silent debut about a mysterious tenant in a London boarding house. Visually inventive and genuinely unsettling, it shows Hitch finding his voice before sound film even arrived.

But Silent cinema requires patience. No dialogue and piano score can feel distant compared to the spoken word.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Jamaica Inn

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Wrecking Crew2026

Both dramatize the real criminal industry of Cornish ship-wrecking, but through opposite registers—Hitchcock's is interior and psychological, this is exterior and action-driven.

Less famous than Jamaica Inn but directly about the same subject—Cornish wreckers luring ships to their doom. This American production brings visceral action to the same historical crime, shot on location in the actual landscape.

But It's more interested in spectacle and heroics than atmosphere; you lose the Gothic dread for rescue-mission excitement.

Peeping Tom1960

Michael Powell's transgressive thriller about a killer who films his murders. It predates Psycho and is far more disturbing—a masterpiece about voyeurism and cinema itself.

But It's genuinely upsetting and the moral clarity is deliberately ambiguous. Some will find it exploitative rather than artistic.

The Third Man1949

Carol Reed's post-war Vienna noir with Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, and Trevor Howard. Visually dazzling, morally complex, and propelled by Anton Karas's zither score—cinema at its most seductive.

But It's plotted like a puzzle and rewards close attention. If you want emotional clarity, you won't find it.

Night Train to Lisbon2013

A lesser-known atmospheric British thriller set aboard a luxury train. Similar period mood and intricate criminal plotting with excellent supporting players.

But It lacks Hitchcock's fame and Laughton's star power; you've probably never heard of it and that's not accidental.

The Man Between1953

Carol Reed's Cold War noir with James Mason as an amoral fixer in divided Berlin. Spy intrigue and moral compromise with a texture not unlike Jamaica Inn's shadowy criminality.

But The ideological stakes feel dated and the pacing is deliberate in ways that test modern patience.

Dead of Night1945

British horror anthology built around a man trapped in recurring nightmares. Genuinely eerie, episodic, and features the most disturbing ventriloquist dummy in cinema.

But It's uneven—some episodes work brilliantly, others feel like padding. The wraparound concept grows repetitive.

The Night of the Iguana1964

Both trap a cast of morally compromised characters in an isolated location and force them to confront what they've become. Jamaica Inn does it through crime; this does it through sex and faith—same engine, different fuel.

John Huston's adaptation of Tennessee Williams set in a remote Mexican hotel where secrets and moral desperation fester under tropical pressure. Richard Burton as an unfrocked priest caught between desire and damnation—the spiritual decay mirrors Jamaica Inn's moral rot.

But It's a chamber piece more concerned with dialogue and psychology than plot. Tennessee Williams' style of theatrical melodrama will feel overwrought if you don't surrender to it.

Twilight of the Dogs1995

Both see crime not as individual evil but as woven into the fabric of rural life—not villains visiting wrongdoing but communities where wrongdoing is simply what people do to survive.

A 1978 Soviet crime drama about rural corruption and brutality in the post-war countryside. Shot in stark, unflinching black-and-white with the texture of documentary. It has Jamaica Inn's interest in criminality embedded in landscape and community, but from the opposite side of the world and through a materialist lens rather than Gothic psychology.

But Soviet cinema moves at its own pace and has no interest in reassuring you. Subtitled, morally bleak, and you may not find it easily distributed outside specialty channels.