Saboteur

1942
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker

I'm sorry I've been neglecting you blog, just with exams and holidays and all I've been a bit distracted the last few weeks. Plus frankly in this time I haven't even watched that much, including having not been to the cinema in nearly two months, which I'll try to remedy soon. But for now, I figured this would be a good time to expand my viewing of some classic Hitchcock, starting with a boxset I have at home which has been unfairly ignored until now.

Saboteur is his oldest film in the collection and Hitchcock's first film with an all-American cast. I can hardly say I know much about Hitchcock, but this film definitely feels like a precursor to much of his later work; many of the same tropes and trademarks feature: a case of mistaken identity, the use of landmark locations, cross-continental travel, double crossing, beautiful blondes, repressed sexuality. Indeed, Saboteur feels very much like a lite version of North by Northwest or The 39 Steps. 

In this case, Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), a factory worker in an aircraft manufacturing plant is accused of sabotage after a fire envelops the factory, destroying all inside and killing his best friend. Forced to go on the run, he ends up coming into contact with this film's Blonde Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane), and they go on the lam together, aiming to find the real saboteurs behind the attack. Even just the plot is a working version of North by Northwest, although this in itself is not a bad thing. It's an immensely enjoyable film, very tightly packed together and rapidly paced to make this a short but sprightly experience, with no time wasted on meandering plotting or heavy character development.

Despite having a lower budget than he would later come to receive, Hitchcock still manages to create some notable setpieces: a shootout in a movie theatre and the climax on the Statue of Liberty being the standouts. However, it may be down to an under-developed script or a rushed scene but the very end of the film does feel very anticlimactic and brief, especially given what it follows.

What is unusual with this is just how American it actually feels. Of course much of Hitchcock's best work is set in big cities and small towns in the US, but due to the wartime context there are times when this lapses into blundering propaganda. It is interesting in how explicitly it chooses to reference the war, but Kane's journey across America where he learns the true nature of democratic kindness and an inherent love of one's neighbour from a kindly blind man and a trope of travelling circus freaks can feel heavy-handed at times. Occasional impassioned speeches and wonderfully devious double-crossing villains only serve to accentuate this. It feels more blunt when you consider Hitchcock made the fantastically nuanced and psychologically complex Shadow of a Doubt just a year later.

But these still remain different films. At heart, Saboteur is a perfectly acceptable pulpy thriller. It's very much a Hitchcock film, but this earlier work feels like a work-in-progress when compared to his later output. The plot is quite flawed at points, and some scenes had me questioning how characters would suddenly end up in different places instantly following some strange editing. But this may be down to its need to maintain its very lively pacing. In the end, I didn't care that this was a more undeveloped version of his later work; I had a lot of fun watching this and found myself greatly engaged by it. It's still an expertly shot film which makes great use of close-ups to create some notable tension.