Hitchcock the magnificent

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2008)

Ah, Hitchcock! It's hard to find a bad Hitchcock movie until he lost it after THE BIRDS (1963) and SABOTEUR proves the point. Having admired most of this director's work for many years, I had managed to skip this one, perhaps from lack of interest in Priscilla Lane and Robert Cummings as lead actors. I was of course familiar with the Statue of Liberty climax from having seen it repeatedly in film retrospectives but I wrongly assumed the story leading up to it might not hold my interest. Was I wrong! The suspenseful plot gets cooking right off the bat through a chance encounter between the Bad Guy Saboteur and the Good Guy Wrongly Accused protagonist and continues zooming along through a series of further chance encounters and narrow escapes. Familiar Hitchcockian elements are all there: the innocent person wrongly accused of a crime; people not being what they seem to be; dramatic or unlikely locations that intensify the suspenseful scene being played out within them (an airplane hangar, a ranch, a bridge from which the handcuffed hero hurls himself to escape the police, a sumptuous charity ball in a palatial mansion, an upper floor of a skyscraper, and finally the torch of the Statue of Liberty).
Throughout is humor provided by supporting players, generous dollops of early WW2- vintage social comment, moments of human warmth where suffering people find it within themselves to lend a hand to help a fellow human, getting nothing in return – in short, there was always a basic humanity at the core of Hitchcock, however grisly the trappings - a sensational cast of supporting players, chiefly Otto Kruger as the slickest villain this side of George Sanders (his Broadway credits include the male lead in Noel Coward's PRIVATE LIVES – and that says it all) and weaselly Norman Lloyd as the titular saboteur, not to mention Alma Kruger – no relation to Otto – as a prominent society dowager involved in fifth column intrigue (her character foreshadows that of Claude Rains's mother in NOTORIOUS). Priscilla Lane does a fine job with a difficult role. For most of her early scenes we can't tell whether she believes the hero to be innocent or guilty and she seems constantly to shift her opinion, not coming over to his side fully until late in the proceedings. One cannot ascertain whether her acting is at fault or whether we are meant to be kept in a state of uncertainty, but the plot developments are so swift, fun and clever that we really don't care what she thinks.
Then there are the peculiar Hitchcock touches that have nothing to do with the plot. Twice the Lane character pauses to get change for a quarter – once to reimburse her kidnappers for an ice cream soda and again to make a call from a phone booth. Why these scenes were inserted are anybody's guess, perhaps to make the film seem more realistic and thus heighten the believability and suspense? Or perhaps to give the audience a moment to catch its breath? Some of the characters are over the top – the garrulous truck driver, the impossibly kind and trusting blind man living alone in a spotlessly maintained forest cabin, the political-philosophy-spouting "human skeleton" and other members of the circus caravan who hide the protagonists from their pursuers.