A Statue of Liberty Play

Rating: 6/10 (14 June 2007)

On my VHS box of Saboteur the film was noted as Alfred Hitchcock's first with an all American cast. Thinking about it you can make that claim for it considering the foreign locations of both Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent.
Saboteur involves Robert Cummings as both the pursuer and the pursued. The police think he's a Saboteur who bombed a Los Angeles aircraft factory where he worked. Cummings knows it was Norman Lloyd who did it, a mysterious man named Fry. So Cummings is both evading the cops and looking for the real Saboteur who can clear him.
The chase and pursue theme is one that Hitchcock uses over and over again from The Thirty Nine Steps to North By Northwest. In both of those films it was much better done.
Hitchcock did not pick his leading players in this film. Priscilla Lane had left Warner Brothers and was looking to broaden her appeal. She'd signed with Universal and Hitchcock had to take her. She's good, but she's hardly in the image of classic sophisticated Hitchcock blonds like Grace Kelly, Madeleine Carroll, or Eva Marie Saint. She's just to perky to compete with those ladies.
Bob Cummintgs was a second choice, Hitchcock wanted and couldn't get Joel McCrea. That proved to be a fortunate accident. Cummings is froth with youthful idealism in his performance, he holds his own in confrontational scenes with master fifth columnist Otto Kruger.
In fact the villains here are the most interesting characters. Whether they are from the isolationist mid-west like Otto Kruger or society matrons like Alma Kruger or some nobodies like Clem Bevans, Alan Baxter, or Norman Lloyd, they've drunken in the philosophy of a master race and find it heady stuff indeed. Listen to Otto Kruger's explanation for his treason, his contempt for the easily manipulated voters, his drive for power as well as money. The most frightening part of the film.
More even than that climax at the Statue of Liberty. For years the torch on the statue has been closed so Cummings and Lloyd at the top is maybe even more thrilling for today's audience than at the time the film was released. But Hitchcock himself said he made a mistake, when he did the chase in North By Northwest, better to have the hero than the villain do the dangling.
It's not one of Hitchcock's best films, but Saboteur holds up well for today's audience and in an age of global terror, very relevant.