What Does a Saboteur Look Like?

Rating: 6/10 (10 April 2015)

"You look like a saboteur," Pat says to Barry accusatively.
What are we to make of this remark? First of all, there is reality. We all know as a general rule, saboteurs do not have a distinctive look. Now, inasmuch as World War II had just broken out, I suppose that if Barry had been Japanese or German, her remark would have been appropriate. Of course, today we would call that racial profiling, but since this movie was made in 1942, she could have gotten away with it. But Barry does not appear to be either.
Second, there is type casting. A movie producer might call up an agent, and say, "We're making a spy movie. Do you have anyone who looks like a saboteur? If so, send him over for an interview." And then the agent might send over someone like Norman Lloyd, the man who plays the saboteur named Fry in the movie. But the agent would not have sent over Robert Cummings.
Third, there is the reason why Pat said it. After she expresses her difficulty in believing that any American would be a saboteur, Barry responds, "Well, you believe it about me!" She replies that he is different, because he looks like a saboteur. And that is peculiar, because neither reality nor movie stereotyping would make anyone say that about someone who looks like Robert Cummings. Besides, she had a very good reason for thinking he was a saboteur, which has nothing to do with his looks. When she first met him, she saw that he was wearing handcuffs, and she realized that he was the fugitive the police were looking for.
Actually, it is precisely because Barry does not look like a saboteur that he is able to avoid the police. After he jumps out of the police car, he jumps from the bridge into the river below. The truck driver that had earlier given him a ride recognizes him, and he misdirects the police so that Barry can escape. Now, why would anyone do that? I would have helped the police by pointing out where Barry was hiding. All we can conclude is that the truck driver figured Barry did not look like a criminal, so he helped him escape.
Barry takes shelter in a blind man's house. When his niece Pat turns up, and she sees the handcuffs that her uncle Philip already knew about on account of his acute hearing, she says he should have turned him in to the police. Her uncle accuses her of being cruel. He assures her that Barry is not dangerous. And besides, he argues, a man is innocent until proved guilty. Now, because Philip is blind, he obviously cannot be coming to these incredible conclusions simply on account of Barry's looks. But Philip tells Pat that he can see intangible things, like innocence.
Pat pretends to go along with what her uncle wants, which is to take Barry to a blacksmith to get the handcuffs off, but she tries to take him to the police instead. That doesn't work, however, and after some complications, they find themselves in the company of some circus freaks. Some of them want to turn Barry over to the police, who are inspecting the circus trucks, but the deciding vote is the bearded lady who blathers about how fine it is that Pat has stuck with Barry through his difficulties, and therefore they must be good people. This makes about as much sense as when earlier a man and a woman saw Barry kidnap Pat, dragging her into the car against her will, and the woman said, "My, they must be terribly in love."
What these three instances—that of the truck driver, Uncle Philip, and the freaks—have in common is that appearances, in one form or another, make people decide to thwart the police and help the fugitive. Toward the end of the movie, Tobin, one of the villains, says of Barry that he is noble, fine, and pure, and that is why he is misjudged by everyone. But save for the police, Barry is not misjudged by others. The point of this line is to show just how much evil foreigners underestimate Americans. Americans, being basically noble, fine, and pure, can readily see the goodness in others, which is why they are willing to help a fugitive from justice escape from the police: they can just tell that Barry is noble, fine, and pure.
In some ways, this movie reminds us of "The 39 Steps" (1935), made several years earlier. In that movie, a man is also falsely suspected of being a spy and has to convince a woman that he is really a good guy. There is a pair of handcuffs in that movie too, except that the man and woman are handcuffed together in that one. However, "Saboteur" also made me think of "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943), which Hitchcock made just a year later, in which appearances, instead of being dependable, turn out to be deceptive. Perhaps the one was a reaction to the other.