A solid wartime thriller

Rating: 7/10 (2 August 2015)

Hitchcock is one of those directors that every film buff is aware of, but few will admit to having seen none of his films. Prior to this, I'd only seen THE BIRDS and PSYCHO (in that order), but that was a long time ago so I consider this to be my (re)introduction to him. Other than a lot of suspense, I wasn't really sure what to expect from SABOTEUR. It turned out to be quite good for an early Hitchcock film, although it betrays the time in which it was made a little too much. The story is about Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), who works at an airplane factory. One day a catastrophic fire kills one of his friends and he's pinned as the one responsible. This sets him on a journey to prove his innocence and find out just what is going on. Generally speaking, there wasn't a dull moment in this, although I do think it began to lose some narrative steam in the final half-hour as they struggle to find a way to keep the action going after the villain's endgame is (sort of) revealed. I do think it was well-acted and had interesting characters, although nearly everyone upstages Barry's "Average Joe." My two favorite characters are Philip Martin, the blind man he meets, and Tobin, someone who turns out to be very important. These two characters also happen to have a couple scenes which very eruditely give the thematic concerns we're supposed to take away from the film. Given that this produced during American involvement in WWII, anybody who didn't support the war effort would naturally have been looked on with suspicion. This is why the villains are saboteurs who aim to damage the US war effort. However, the blind man (in what might have been a compromise with the studio?) is made to say that even in times of war, our democratic principles still hold and a person is innocent until proved guilty. Without that counterpoint, I feel that the film would have verged on being jingoistic and meaninglessly patriotic. While I'm not too much enamored of the way the film reduces wartime politics to an "us vs them" binary, Hitchcock did make a solidly thrilling picture that is still quite relevant today.