Hide and Seek is a 1964 British thriller film directed by Cy Endfield and starring Ian Carmichael, Curt Jurgens and Janet Munro.

[2] David Garrett is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, working on tracking Russian rocket launches.

Garrett is confused by the apparently secretive way that one player, Richter, transfers the knight chess piece to Melnicker.

Garrett arrives at the Ministry of Defence for a meeting, and while in the bathroom a box of chess pieces is dropped off to him that his driver believes he mistakenly left in the car.

When he arrives at the hall he finds the display being torn down, with the demonstration cancelled due to Melnicker not returning after lunch.

At the address, Garrett rings the doorbell to the flat and a young woman named Maggie calls to him from the second floor.

Garrett is starting to doubt he is in the correct place, when he sees Maggie talking to Richter and finds a room upstairs with a chessboard that is missing the knight piece he has.

It is revealed that this was all an elaborate trap to trick Garrett to "voluntarily" come to this hotel - he has been used like a pawn in a chess game.

He finds two life jackets in the boat, and it appears to Marek (watching from the hotel with binoculars) that Garrett and Maggie are attempting to swim to a nearby island with a castle.

[3] He wrote, "I was after the sort of roles that were being played so expertly by Cary Grant: the glossy, middle-of-the-road, domestic comedy at which the Americans excelled, or the superbly turned Hitchcock thriller.

[6] He said "it turned into a chaotic mess, with Chester breathing down the neck of the director, Cy Endfield, and ran weeks over schedules.

[8] Carmichael later wrote "very few people saw" the film, adding, "I believe it has appeared occasionally on television, but my big chance to show my paces in a different type of role and ceuvre was torpedoed almost from the outset.

Looseness in script and editing is clearly obvious, so that there is padding in some stages and, at others, important points are glossed over or left absurdly unanswered.

"[10] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "A sort of poor man's James Bond exercise, feebly directed in sub-Hitchcock manner.

The customary paraphernalia of sinister men in raincoats, thugs in dark glasses, and stern old ladies on trains, is here manipulated flatly and without effect; intriguing possibilities (like the black knight) are started up, then made nothing of; and the dénouement, after a lengthy but unconvincing disquisition from Curt Jurgens explaining how his whole plot was arranged like a chess game, is crammed into about forty seconds flat.

Ian Carmichael, overdoing both comic and dramatic effects, makes an unprepossessing hero; most of the minor roles are dully overacted; and even Hugh Griffith, gleefully hamming it up as a modern Noah fleeing the nuclear deluge, fails to make his scenes seem anything other than tiresome irrelevancies designed to bolster a faltering plot.

"[11] The New York Times called the film "a pleasantly diverting, terribly British, sometimes contrived melodrama, that is true to its title but hardly the best of this genre to come along.

"[12] Filmink argued "Cy Enfield wasn’t a natural director of this material" and Ian Carmichael was "not charismatic enough for this role, and Janet Munro is definitely too hot for him in this movie.

"[13] British film critic Leslie Halliwell said: "Too many mysterious happenings with too little explanation sink this comedy-thriller from the start.

Director Cy Endfield mishandles the jokier aspects of the plot, in which a scientist working on a top secret project is presumed to have defected when, in actuality, he's been kidnapped.