On The Anti-Fascist Front-(Sir) Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” (1942) A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Saboteur, starring Robert Cumming, Norman Lloyd, Priscilla Lane, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, screenplay written along with others by Dorothy Parker, 1942

No question the late director Alfred (oops, Sir) Hitchcock knew how to direct suspenseful thrillers even if today he would be priced out of the market for lacking the now quintessential high tech whistles and bells you need to get an audience’s attention. The film under review, Saboteur, from 1942 meaning in the thick of the European War and the jump start of the Pacific War after the dastardly deeds at Pearl Harbor makes this one an add-on patriotic suspense film as well about the nefarious deeds of enemy agents (probably German-Axis foes from the way the story wind around and who the agents portrayed are but left to the imagination and the assumption that the audience didn’t have to be spoon-fed who the enemy was just then). The best thing about this patriotic push is that enemy plots are exposed not by excellent professional police work if there is such a thing but by Joe average citizen (as usual in a drama not centered on police procedurals the professionals local, state and federal are always about six steps behind the real action). There is something reassuring about that even if you have to pull a few straws, make a few escaped rather implausible to make it come out right.     

This is the way an average citizen stopped the bad guys in this one. Airplane worker Barry Kane had helped try to put out a fire in the plant but had been wrongly accused of sabotage when it was discovered that he had passed a fire extinguisher to his co-worker that was filled with gasoline. That co-worker died and the circumstances led the authorities to figure out that it was sabotage-Barry’s work. Naturally to clear himself he has to avoid the coppers, to go on the lam if you want to know. Just as naturally since he had a big target on his back as the “fall guy” for the work of enemy agents he is hounded at every stop. Even by his eventual romantic interest, Pat, played by wholesome American womanhood Priscilla Lane, who is ready to turn him at every opportunity until almost the end when she is made to realize that this guy is a serious patriot. And she is serious smitten with him to boot (smitten seems right but she sure had her guy jumping through hoops to prove something to her-any other guy, a non-smitten guy would have walked away the first time she tried to finger him.)     

So Barry the fall guy had to find out why he has a big target on his back and maybe find out what else the bad guys are up to. In the beginning the only clue he has is a guy named Fry, played by Norman Lloyd. Fry is the guy who handed Barry the bogus fire extinguisher. So the trail blows hot and cold as he follows whatever leads he can muster (and still keep a fair distance from the law-although he got grabbed a couple of times along the but that was simple stuff to get out off-remember the cloddy coppers mentioned above). In the process of finding Fry he finds out that there is a whole network of enemy agents working to blow things up. And not creepy has-been malcontents and flaky anarchist but the cream of American society (the  American Firsters is what the play is-the group that hero Charles Lindberg got egg in his face over when Pearl Harbor blew everything to bits-including isolationism).

Get this they wanted to blow the Boulder Dam to smithereens, wanted to blow up a Navy ship in Brooklyn (yeah, these rats were everywhere) and maybe who knows the Empire State Building. They never got that far because Barry stopped them cold. Stopped Fry too in one of the most famous shots in all film-dom with Fry after hot pursuit slipping away from the pursuing Barry and falling to his death at the Statute of Liberty. Yeah, that Alfred, Sir Alfred Hitchcock could keep you guessing right until the end even if you knew how the deal was going to go down. A classic.