Hitchcock does propaganda.

Rating: 6/10 (30 March 2017)

A wartime propaganda thriller, Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur is designed to evoke a strong sense of patriotism and righteousness in its viewers; as such, it is about as subtle as a brick, but not totally without its merits, delivering a couple of reasonably executed suspense scenes and a fun finale atop the Statue of Liberty.
Robert Cummings stars as airplane factory worker Barry Kane, who becomes a fugitive after he is wrongly accused of sabotage. Going on the run in an attempt to clear his name, Barry teams up with beautiful blonde model Patricia Martin (Priscilla Lane) and uncovers a group of ruthless fifth columnists who are plotting a series of terrorist attacks.
Hitchcock handles the action well enough, but even his deft direction cannot overcome the silly nature of a script that sees Kane repeatedly escape capture due to the trusting nature of complete strangers (where, in reality, he would be turned over to the authorities tout suite) and which relies rather heavily on chance (the taxi cab drivers seeing Pat flicking the light switch on and off in a room at the top of a skyscraper is beyond dumb).
Also not helping matters much is the occasionally poor editing: a shootout in a movie theatre proves hard to follow, whilst Kane's escape from a locked storeroom, where he has activated the sprinkler system, is nothing short of a miracle—one second he is trapped, the next he is out on the street.
Thankfully, the giddying finale at the pinnacle of America's proud symbol of freedom rounds off the film in style, with Hitch using lots of inventive camera angles (and some dodgy matte work) to raise the tension.