The director Michael Anderson's penchant for melodrama, already noticed in Shake Hands with the Devil, led in 1961 to almost unanimous critical disdain for The Naked Edge. The composer received brickbats too : the anonymous Guardian critic wrote of “so insistent a weight of background music”, while Time magazine observed that the “cellos groan ominously in what ought to be called the film's foreground music”. Background, foreground … Alwyn's defiantly confrontational cues seem to fly in the face of his maxim that music should be “sensed and not predominant - predominant but only sensed”.

Yet Anderson, Alwyn, and photographer Erwin Hillier were simply attempting the fashionable. Dragnet had first appeared on American television screens in 1951, compensating for its small black-and-white image with strident dialogue, camera work, editing techniques - and orchestral cues. Since then both small and large screens on each side of the Atlantic had discovered the fast style. The Naked Edge also hung onto the coat-tails of Hitchcock's popular Psycho, its publicity stressing that the screenplay was by the same writer (Joseph Stefano), and adapting a similar gimmick of refusing admission during the last thirteen minutes of the film. The tale concerns George Radcliffe (Gary Cooper), a businessman whose “killing” on the stock market at the same time as the murder of his employer arouses the suspicions of his wife Martha (Deborah Kerr) and her fear that he plans the same for her. Like its publicity, the plot is gimmicky, and, like Psycho, it is built on a confidence trick.

The film's stridency not only contributed to its critical and artistic failure but masks a genuine attempt to explore the couple's relationship. The performances are sensitive: Gary Cooper as Radcliffe portrays a helpless dismay at the suspicions of his wife, played by Deborah Kerr, who herself ranges subtly through the emotions of doubt, fear, despair, panic, and submission ; Eric Portman offers a discerning portrait of the real murderer. Where the script fails is in its failure to establish early on the couple's close relationship, for which a single scene would have sufficed. The film's failure to cohere, nevertheless, derives not solely from a script deficiency but partly from a fault in the score.

The Naked Edge is a film about daggers, razors, and the emotional edging forward, little by little, of the two surfaces of a relationship, the breakdown of trust.