Heading North by Northeast ...

Rating: 6/10 (31 May 2005)

In the course of the unlikely events that unfold in Alfred Hitchcock's 1942 adventure, SABOTEUR, the prototypical Wrongly Accused Man (along with the obligatory Cool Blonde) ends up on a circus train where Hitchcock and his writers serve up an impromptu social studies lesson on the basics of American democracy. The fate of the fugitive lovers comes down to a vote of a microcosm of our political system as defined by a carload of circus performers. Those voting include Siamese twins, bound together by nature and separated by an innate need to disagree (Republicans and Democrats?); a "fascist" dwarf (the reactionary far right?); The Fat Lady, whose sympathy for both sides of the arguments render her neutral and noncommittal (the pacifist and indecisive far left?) and The Thin Man, a bony old codger who knows the right thing to do, but feels compelled to bend to the will of the majority (Uncle Sam?). The final vote falls to The Bearded Lady, an androgynous old woman who lets her emotions rule over her common sense (the average American voter, perhaps?).
It is a mildly satirical scene that may or may not carry any real, great meaning, but its absurdity suggests what SABOTEUR could have been. Couple it with the film's famed finale, the tense, yet utterly ridiculous tussle atop the Statue of Liberty, and you can see the possibilities. SABOTEUR is to some degree an example of wartime patriotic propaganda, yet there is a subversive undercurrent to the tale: The villains are disguised as family men and do-gooder socialites; the American populous is defined as sideshow freaks; and the Cool Blonde is a model, a pretty and shallow tool of capitalism. And the hapless wrongly accused hero on the run is, on the one hand, the epitome of strong, resourceful American individualism, as well as being the stereotypical loner who is betrayed by the system.
Even so, SABOTEUR is not so much satirical as just silly. Though Hitchcock plays it all more or less straight, adding but a few darkly whimsical touches here and there, the blend of humor and thrill don't quite gel. Though the story seems to be a trial run for similar themes he would recycle in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, one gets the feeling that it would all have been better as a straightforward comedy, such as Bob Hope starring in MY FAVORITE SABOTEUR.
The story involves Robert Cummings as Barry Kane, a worker at a wartime munitions factory which is a target for sabotage. Though Kane should be a key witness in identifying the actual saboteur, his information is casually disregarded by the none-too-bright police and he becomes the prime player in a cross country chase, which ironically goes North by Northeast, as Kane heads form Los Angeles to Washington D.C. This is not top-drawer Hitchcock, as evidenced by the B-list cast of actors. The film is not helped much by the rather bland performance by Cummings, still a decade or so from the sitcom fame that would allow him to develop a genuine comedic charm.
And Hitchcock runs into what is a standard problem in many of his films, the question of "Why doesn't he just go to the police?" The prototypical Hitchcock adventure finds an innocent man who is forced to solve a crime and track down the villains (usually with the help of the blonde love interest), because he can't trust the authorities. Such plots, if you examine them too closely, are often ludicrous and contrive extreme complications to keep the hero running from the cops and toward the bad guys. It is the primary weakness of SABOTEUR that so much hinges on so little: there is just no logical reason for Kane not to go to the police and not even much reason for the police to be after him in the first place. It is to the director's credit that he gets the action moving along so nicely with such little motivation. I suspect that the man on the run plot premise was already so ingrained into the fabric of film storytelling even in 1942, that moviegoers just didn't bother to question the logic.