Review of Saboteur (1942) by Paul V — 29 May 2010

Saboteur's pretty profoundly cheesy, with as flat and uncomplicated a main character as a movie can possibly have. This is probably the closest thing Hitchcock's ever done to popcorn entertainment. Some of the writing really sparkles, though; Alfred Hitchcock and Dorothy Parker conjure up several lines of surprising banter. Not much of this vivacity goes toward the plot, which is a pretty cut-and-dried assault against the Fascist regime. There are the tiniest glimpses of sympathy and human interest in the film's antagonists, and they aren't treated exactly like monstrous freedom haters, but the politics are about as diluted as 1942 would force them to be. Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane are both sufficient and pretty, and the only real standout is Otto Kruger's creepingly sinister anti-American baddie.

This is definitely one of Hitchcock's high action films. Cummings is always on the run...jumping off bridges, hiding in trains, bounding around national landmarks. It's never about why he's doing it, so much as the fact that he IS doing it and the audience is there to enjoy it. The very few plot developments seem placed to move him from set piece to set piece. In fact, Saboteur is highly illogical if anything, with some surprisingly poor editing. In one scene, for instance, Cummings is trapped in the basement of a building. We see him pull a fancy trick, perhaps the start of some great escape plan, and then in literally the next shot we see him across the street from the building! The implication is that he escaped, but it is extremely incomplete. We stumble through scenes like this until finally the movie culminates in an admittedly stunning showdown at the Statue of Liberty. Filmed entirely without music, it's easy to see the beginnings of who would become a notoriously ballsy director. Its wholesale remake in North by Northwest, however, caused it to become sadly obsolete.

Not a bad film by any means, but a pretty obvious early effort that lacks the shading and character that made Hitchcock's later films so potent. A decent 100 minutes spent in action film history.