Saboteur (film)
Saboteur is a 1942 American spy thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock with a screenplay written by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison and Dorothy Parker. The film stars Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane and Norman Lloyd.
Not to be confused with Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 film Sabotage.Plot[edit]
Aircraft factory worker Barry Kane wrongly falls under suspicion of setting fire to his Glendale, California manufacturing plant during World War II, an act of domestic sabotage. Kane believes the actual culprit to be an apparent employee, Fry, that he encountered earlier. When no one by that name is found to have worked there, Kane becomes the target of a manhunt. He remembers an address from an envelope carried by Fry, and hitches a truck ride out to a huge ranch in the desert. Kane discovers that the ranch's owner, Charles Tobin, is secretly collaborating with a group of saboteurs that includes Fry.
Kane escapes and takes refuge with a blind man and his niece, Patricia Martin. She believes Kane guilty and attempts to turn him in to the police, but Kane kidnaps Martin and travels east in search of Fry. They stow away on a circus caravan, and eventually reach the ghost town being used as an outpost by Tobin's spy ring. Kane successfully poses as an accomplice and infiltrates the group, who is next planning to sabotage the launch of a new battleship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Martin goes to the local sheriff, but he turns out to be in league with Tobin as well. Kane accompanies the saboteurs to New York, where they regroup at the mansion of a rich philanthropist and Nazi sympathizer, Mrs. Sutton. Tobin arrives and denounces Kane. Kane is locked in the Sutton basement, and Martin is imprisoned in an office high up Rockefeller Center. She drops a note out of the window, and the cab drivers who find it alert the FBI to rescue her.
Kane escapes the Sutton mansion by triggering a fire alarm, and rushes to the Navy Yard. He finds Fry preparing to blow up the battleship, and attempts to overpower him. By the time Fry detonates the bomb, the ship is already launched and safe. Fry takes Kane prisoner and returns to the Rockefeller Center office to find the authorities waiting. Fry flees, terrorizing a movie audience at Radio City Music Hall at gunpoint, and eventually taking the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Kane pursues Fry onto Lady Liberty's torch. Fry accidentally falls over the platform's railing and clings to the statue's hand. Kane tries to rescue him, but as the police and FBI arrive, Fry falls to his death.
Reception[edit]
Saboteur did "very well at the box office even with its B-list cast"; it made a "tidy profit for all involved."[4] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film a "swift, high-tension film which throws itself forward so rapidly that it permits slight opportunity for looking back. And it hurtles the holes and bumps which plague it with a speed that forcefully tries to cover them up."[22] Crowther commented that "so abundant [are] the breathless events that one might forget, in the hubbub, that there is no logic in this wild-goose chase"; he also questioned the "casual presentation of the FBI as a bunch of bungling dolts, [the film's] general disregard of authorized agents, and [its] slur on the navy yard police", all of which "somewhat vitiates the patriotic implications which they have tried to emphasize in the film."[22]
Time magazine called Saboteur "one hour and 45 minutes of almost simon-pure melodrama from the hand of the master"; the film's "artful touches serve another purpose which is only incidental to Saboteur's melodramatic intent. They warn Americans, as Hollywood has so far failed to do, that fifth columnists can be outwardly clean and patriotic citizens, just like themselves."[23]
Norman Lloyd recalls that Ben Hecht told Hitchcock after seeing the death of a character in the finale, "He should have had a better tailor."[24]
Legacy[edit]
Critic Rob Nixon, writing for Turner Classic Movies, points out that Saboteur shares several essential elements with Hitchcock's later movie North by Northwest (1959), including the ordinary/every-man protagonist who gets accused of a terrible crime and must avoid being captured by the police as he attempts to solve the mystery and clear his name (which is a recurring theme in Hitchcock's movies), and, the climactic scene in which the protagonist attempts to save another character from falling off a huge national monument.[25]