Hitchcock has so much fun chasing such attractively evil fellows, you will, too

Rating: 7/10 (7 August 2010)

Saboteur (1942)
Sometimes a mix of humor and crisis can be especially moving, both more funny and more sad. I don't mean tragicomedy, exactly, the Shakespeare stuff, but just a movie about something big and yet the characters are a little silly. We can identify with them as they go to save the world.
I think that's the idea in "Foreign Correspondent," the closest Hitchcock movie to this one in flavor, and made two years before this one as WWII was breaking out. It was a call to arms, and "Saboteur" is a perfect continuation, firmly on American soil, of the fight to win the war by some very ordinary people. But for me, "Saboteur" doesn't quite get past some of the slightly goofy or awkward moments, though I'll bet Hitchcock noticed and left things the way they were quite on purpose. He rarely wanted high levels of realism, at least not unbroken, and our leads here, mainly Robert Cummings as Barry Kane, factory worker, get away with little cinematic things, like hiding behind a rock and not being seen by someone standing right there.
This is something to get used to in almost every Hitchcock movie. It's a little like someone is sitting and telling the story and you are picturing it, so you get the basic idea right but not all the logistics. Another early example is falling down and seeing the letters on the floor. No one acts with physical realism, but we get the information we need to continue. The astonishing last scenes (I won't say where or what) are more artifice as theater as cinema. It's great, but it's beautifully artificial.
Kane, the character, is a disarmingly nice fellow, and he's the innocent man accused to wrong, a perennial theme for the director. He is both fleeing and chasing. He meets unreasonably helpful good people and surprisingly incompetent bad ones. But he represents our wanting to be helping and running and succeeding, too, in the war effort, which was becoming all consuming for the nation. It's all done with reserve and a touch of humor, but underneath it is a deadly seriousness. Hitch knew his audience wanted to be rallied, so he rallied them.
The thing that made "Foreign Correspondent" a bit better at this style is a better cast, and some funnier lines. But "Saboteur" is no slouch--it's well made with precision as it careens through incident after incident, and it has two scenes near the end that are legendary (the one in the movie theater especially artful).
We know more or less how this story might end, but we do with Jane Austen, too, and no one bothers about that. It's all about getting there. And saving the day. And falling in love.