Saboteur (1942) - film review

During World War II, Barry Kane finds himself wrongly accused of starting a fire which kills a man at an aircraft factory in California.   Kane believes he knows the identity of the real saboteur, a man named Fry, and goes on the run to find him and bring him to justice.  Unbeknown to him, Fry is part of a large network of dangerous Nazi agents who are well assimilated into American society and whose campaign of terror has only just begun...

Saboteur is the first of Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime propaganda films during World War II.  By the time he made this film, Hitchcock had established himself as one of the foremost directors in Hollywood, achieving success with Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941).   Despite the impact he had made, the director felt undervalued by his producer David O. Selznick and was grateful when Selznick loaned him out to Frank Lloyd and Jack H. Skirball at Universal Pictures to make Saboteur, a big budget adventure-thriller of the kind he was so adept at making.

As it turned out, the making of Saboteur was anything but plain sailing.  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour happened just before shooting was to begin, so many of the planned exterior locations could not be used.  Instead, these sequences had to be shot, less convincingly, in the studio backlot.  Another difficulty was the choice of lead actors.  Hitchcock had hoped to cast Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck in the lead roles, but instead Universal foisted the far less well-known Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane on him – they were to have played opposite one another in a film that had just been cancelled.  If Saboteur has one failing, it is the lack of charismatic lead actors with whom the audience can identify - and this stems from Hitchcock’s evident antipathy for his lead actors in this film.  

Saboteur has a structure that is common to several Hitchcock films: an innocent man is wrongly accused of a crime and goes on a long and convoluted run-around to clear his name.  In fact, it is virtually a remake of Hitchcock’s earlier The 39 Steps (1935), and has close similarities with his later North by Northwest (1959).    One of the most interesting aspects of this film is that the villains are portrayed as respectable figures in American society.  This is a recurring motif in Hitchcock’s films: the notion that evil does not easily show itself and often hides behind a mask of respectability.   This may reveal something of Hitchcock’s own neuroses.  In his films, he clearly identifies himself with the ordinary honest man who becomes the outsider – a man who has to fight tooth and nail to prove himself to an overly judgemental world in which the real villains find it remarkably easy to hide themselves.  Did Hitchcock, the unrivalled Master of Suspense, suffer from an inferiority complex and felt he constantly had to demonstrate his worth?

What anyone who watches Saboteur is most likely to remember is the spectacular final sequence on the Statue of Liberty – a classic Hitchcockian set-piece which is perfectly executed.  This was shot on a full-size replica of part of the statue and gives the film a genuinely thrilling climax which Hitchcock rarely surpassed in anything he made subsequently.  Particularly impressive is the shot in which the villain (well played by Norman Lloyd) falls to his death.  This posed a technical challenge that was solved with great ingenuity.  The camera begins with a close-up on the actor, who is sitting on a rotating black swivel chair on a black set (so that the exterior background can be matted in later).  The camera is then suddenly yanked up to the studio ceiling, to create the illusion of the villain falling a huge distance.  The same technique has been used many times since and is still widely employed today.

Although it has many memorable sequences and is an enjoyable film to watch, Saboteur is not regarded as favourably as many of Hitchcock’s thrillers.  It is a film that is uneven, both structurally and stylistically, and somewhat lacking in narrative focus.  A bigger defect is the film’s moralistic and clunky dialogue – this may have served its propaganda purpose during WWII but today it feels painfully unsubtle and patronising.  These faults are to some extent diminished by the unflagging brilliance of Hitchcock’s direction and the excellent production values, particularly the stunning art design and cinematography, which bring a tense, claustrophobic film noir feel that maintains a sense of menace throughout.  There’s also plenty of Hitchcock’s quirky humour to lighten the mood, notably the sequence with the bizarre assortment of circus folk, which manages to be both funny and poignant, although somewhat out of place in this film.

© James Travers 2008

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?