SABOTAGE (1936)

A.K.A.: The Woman Alone

Country: U.K.

Genre(s): Crime / Drama

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Sylvia Sidney / Oskar Homolka / John Loder

  

Plot

When the owner of a London theater is suspected of sabotage, Scotland Yard’s detectives investigate, unintentionally getting the saboteur’s innocent family involved.

What I Liked

Perhaps the most common theme in director Alfred Hitchcock’s catalogue is how a normal appearance can disguise a less savory, even evil, substance hidden beneath.  It’s precisely this sort of fear of the “danger next door” that Hitch plays off of in “Sabotage.”  With Europe edging ever closer to war, that a local family business would be a cover for a foreign terrorist conspiracy must have been particularly disturbing and shocking to British moviegoers.

Perhaps most disconcerting to much of the audience was how relatable Sylvia Sidney was as Mrs. Verloc, the trusting and hard-working Englishwoman who is unknowingly the wife of a saboteur. That her own husband could be a puppet in an international conspiracy must have been unsettling to the female viewers of “Sabotage” who might have found Mrs. Verloc to be an all too familiar character.

As exemplified by the Verlocs, paranoia permeates many levels of “Sabotage.”  Hitchcock’s London is a city where movie theaters and aquariums are meeting places for terrorists, store fronts have back rooms that operate as bomb factories, and those bombs are carried through crowds and onto public transportation.  Considering this, “Sabotage” could just as well be talking about the same kind of fears that would consume post-9/11 America seventy years later.

What I Didn’t Like

Hitchcock was of course a master filmmaker and very adept at knowing how to play with his audiences.  So that he played on the pre-war distrust many Londoners felt for foreigners was not surprising from a business standpoint.  It was an effective method as a means to the director’s end.  However, one could also make the argument that he took a disgracefully easy and irresponsible route to that end.  With the world teetering on the edge of war, Hitchcock did nothing to alleviate tensions by making this film.  Every single foreigner in “Sabotage,” without exception, is up to no good.  In today’s era of political correctness, this fact would certainly have some people up in arms.  Worse yet, from a movie-making perspective, it just seems like lazy, simple-minded filmmaking.  “Sabotage” certainly displays many trademarks of Hitchcock’s signature style in development, but it is still a far cry from the complexity and psychological depth of his more accomplished later work.

Most Memorable Scene

One of the most interesting facets of “Sabotage” are the outdoor scenes, the candid footage of a busy urban environment that was London in the 1930s.  This is the backdrop for what is certainly one of the most disturbing moments in the entire Hitchcock oeuvre.  It is absolutely the centerpiece of the entire film, fraught with tension and horror.  Indeed it is a scene so upsetting that Hitchock himself apparently later expressed regret in making the scene – This from the man who made “Psycho”!  I will not give it away here like it was given away to me.  But even if you know what’s coming, the scene is still shocking considering this film was made in the 1930s.

My Rating: 4 out of 5