Film Review: Saboteur (1942)

The filmography of Alfred Hitchcock is famous for many things, including containing films in which the Master of Suspense explicitly or implicitly remade his earlier works. The best known of these is his grand 1959 classic North by Northwest, which can be interpreted as Hitchcock remaking not one but two of his films. The first of those was his 1935 British spy thriller The 39 Steps and the other was his 1942 Hollywood spy thriller Saboteur.

The film was produced shortly after the United States’ entry into the Second World War and was actually one of the first Hollywood films to use this new situation as a crucial element of the plot. The protagonist is Barry Kane (played by Robert Cummings), a young worker in a Los Angeles aircraft factory. One day a catastrophic fire erupts and Barry’s best friend dies due to a fire extinguisher that was deliberately filled with petrol. The person who handed him the device is Frank Fry (played by Norman Lloyd), a mysterious co-worker whom Barry never sees again. When he tells the authorities about this, they do not believe him, because there are not any records about anybody named “Fry” and, instead, Barry becomes a suspect for sabotage. Determined to clear his name and, more importantly, prevent Fry from doing similar acts elsewhere, Barry escapes and, thanks to a happy accident that gives him clues about Fry’s possible whereabouts, heads to a desert ranch whose seemingly kind-hearted owner Charles Tobin (played by Otto Kruger) is actually revealed to be the head of a well-organised and dangerous spy ring.

Barry is forced to escape again and finds shelter in a cabin owned by Philip Martin (played by Vaughan Glaser), an eccentric blind man who introduces him to his niece, billboard model Patricia “Pat” Martin (played by Priscilla Lane). Unlike her uncle, she is at first unwilling to believe in Barry’s innocence, but after some adventures on the road begins to believe him and the two of them travel to New York City where they try their best to unmask Tobin’s organisation and prevent it from an even deadlier and more spectacular act of sabotage.

Saboteur is one of Hitchcock’s relatively early works in which he was just perfecting the formula that would later lead to some of his classic works in the 1950s. The formula included a plot built around an “ordinary man in an extraordinary situation”, a lot of suspense, a strong memorable villain and some black humour. Hitchcock had used bits of the formula in The 39 Steps, which included the classic “innocent man on the run” plot that was used here and would be used in North by Northwest. Another similarity with the latter film is a spectacular finale that takes place at one of the iconic US landmarks, in this case the Statue of Liberty.

Hitchcock had a good budget for the film, but he could not use his formula freely, being constrained by the needs of wartime propaganda. The United States had, mainly due to a lack of experience and preparedness, suffered many defeats in the first months of the war, with the Japanese conquering large swaths of the Pacific and German U-boats having all but a free hand near the US Eastern Seaboard. As in many other countries, Axis successes in the early years were conveniently explained by the presence of a large, well-organised and dangerous fifth column. The spectacular demise of the famous French ocean liner SS Normandie in New York Harbor, rumoured to be the work of German saboteurs, gave further fuel to such sentiments (and Hitchcock actually used stock footage of the wreck in the film). Saboteur was in some ways designed as a sort of public service announcement, asking citizens to support the war effort by being vigilant and reporting any suspicious characters. The script, partially written by Dorothy Parker, a famous writer with left-wing sympathies, went even further, not only filling the film with patriotic speeches by the protagonists, but also by showing seemingly respected members of the upper classes (like Tobin, played with chilling suaveness by Otto Kruger) as traitors, while working class people and people from the margins of society (like the circus freaks who give shelter to Barry and Pat) as patriots who do the right thing. Saboteur is one of Hitchcock’s most political and definitely most left-wing films.

Saboteur, on the other hand, definitely is not among Hitchcock’s best works. The most noticeable flaw is the relatively bland main cast. Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane are decent, but definitely not in the same league as Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck who were Hitchcock’s original choices for Barry and Pat. Their performances are easily overshadowed not only by the villainous Kruger, but also by a small army of capable character actors who deliver strong performances, including Alan Baxter as a frustrated member of Tobin’s organisation and Norman Lloyd as the sinister Fry. Lloyd, whose character’s demise is one of the most spectacular parts of the film, would ironically live until 2021 and enter the history books as one of the longest-living actors from the Classic Hollywood era.

But even a better cast could not have helped with the structural problems of Saboteur. The film is episodic in nature and functions almost as a road film, with Hitchcock giving a lot of emphasis to eccentric side characters, but failing to weave them into a coherent plot. Before the finale Hitchcock appears to lose interest in his film and wraps it all up in a rather non-cathartic and almost banal fashion. Thankfully, Hitchcock learned some of his lessons and in 1959 delivered an exponentially better film with North by Northwest.

(Note: Saboteur sometimes causes confusion because its title is very similar to Sabotage, Hitchcock’s 1936 classic adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, which had been ironically retitled in order to evade confusion with Secret Agent, another Hitchcock film made roughly at the same time.)

(Note: The USS Alaska, the US Navy battleship which is the target of sabotage in the film and “played” by the SS Normandie wreck, shares its name with a real-life vessel which was built during production. The historic USS Alaska was a battlecruiser, one of the last two ships of that type ever built, and, unlike its fictional counterpart, it was never sabotaged and instead served with distinction in the Pacific theatre after being commissioned in 1944.)

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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