Hitchcock Takes the Gloves Off

Rating: 5/10 (13 January 2016)

"Saboteur" was Alfred Hitchcock's first film made after America's entry into World War II. He had dealt with the war before in "Foreign Correspondent", but because America was still neutral at the time he was forced to do so a roundabout way. That film does indeed feature a European war, a war which has many similarities with the one actually being waged- London, for example is being bombed- but Hitchcock was not allowed to name the Nazis as the aggressors.
Well, after Pearl Harbor Hollywood finally allowed Hitchcock to take the gloves off. "Saboteur" is an unashamed propaganda piece warning Americans to be on their guard against fifth columnists and enemy agents. Hitchcock uses one of his favourite plot devices, one he had already used in the likes of "The 39 Steps" and "Young and Innocent", that of a man wrongly accused of a crime. When an aircraft factory in California is destroyed by fire and a man is killed, Barry Kane, a young worker at the plant, becomes the chief suspect. Kane is forced to go on run to clear his name and expose the real culprits. In the course of a journey which takes him all the way across America to New York he meets a cross-section of Americans, including a garrulous truck driver, a rancher, a blind musician and his model niece, a circus full of freaks and a society hostess. Some of these believe in his innocence and try to help him, others try to hand him over to the police while others turn out to be working for the real saboteurs, a sinister organisation of fifth columnists.
The film works well until about halfway through. There is a tense scene at Tobin's ranch, some striking photography of the Western landscapes and a good cameo from Vaughan Glaser as the kindly musician Phillip Martin. After that, however, things start to go downhill. I have always felt that the point at which it jumps the shark is when Kane and Pat meet the circus freaks, most of whom are horribly unconvincing. (The "human skeleton", for example, is not even particularly thin, and the "bearded lady's" beard is obviously false). There is little real tension in the second half of the film. The scene in Mrs Sutton's mansion is overlong and the one where Kane foils an attempt to destroy a new Navy battleship in Brooklyn Navy Yard is confusing. The sight of a ship lying on its side shortly afterwards might seem to suggest, wrongly, that the saboteurs have in fact succeeded in their efforts. (The stricken ship is in fact the SS Normandie, destroyed by fire in February 1942, but even in 1942 audiences from outside New York might have missed this point).
Hitchcock loved setting cliff-hanging sequences in or on iconic buildings or structures; during his British period in the thirties the Albert Hall, Westminster Cathedral and the Forth Bridge had all been pressed into service for this purpose. He tries to create another one here using the Statue of Liberty, that iconic symbol of American democracy, but the effect of this is lessened by the fact that the person in the greatest danger is not the hero Kane but one of the villains whom the audience would love to see plunge to his death.
Hitchcock originally wanted Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck for the leading roles, but Cooper was uninterested and Stanwyck unavailable. (Cooper seems later to have regretted not working with Hitch; he signed on to star in "The Wreck of the Mary Deare" in the belief that the great man would be directing it, only for Hitchcock to pull out). In the event the roles were taken by Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane; Cummings makes a decent hero, but Lane must be among the least memorable of Hitchcock's trademark blondes. The relationship between Cummings and Lane recalls that between Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in "The 39 Steps"; she initially distrusts him but is persuaded to believe in him and the couple eventually fall in love.
In 1942 Hitchcock was under contract to David O. Selznick, but Selznick rejected the script for this film, one of a number of factors which led to the growth of ill-feeling between director and producer. The film was eventually made by Universal, but it is easy to understand Selznick's reservations. "Saboteur" may have succeeded as a piece of propaganda, but as a piece of film-making it is a relative failure. Hitchcock was capable of much better work than this. 5/10