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.
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