3/5 Mediocre Hitch
  by One-Line Film Reviews (Easton, MD)
The Bottom Line:

Saboteur is mainly remembered for its climax at the Statue of Liberty (which is actually rendered rather tame due to the supposedly-tense lack of music) which is fitting since it's a completely forgettable film otherwise; if you're a fan of the Master you might want to check it out but otherwise watch North by Northwest or The 39 Steps instead.

2.5/4

5/5 "Are you frightened? Is that why you're so cruel?"
  by Found Highways (Las Vegas)
Saboteur, starring Bob Cummings and Priscilla Lane, is Alfred Hitchcock's film about twenty-first century terrorism, even though it came out in 1942.

The evil terrorist mastermind is Charles Tobin, played by Otto Kruger, an actor you sort of remember from other roles in forties movies, as you watch him play verbal games with the traditional Hitchcock innocent victim Barry Kane, played by Bob Cummings.

One of Tobin's agents sets fire to the Los Angeles defense plant where Kane works, killing Kane's best friend. Kane is blamed for the arson but knows who the saboteur really was, and he chases the Nazi spy ring while avoiding the police who think he's a traitor. Kane uncovers more sabotage and terrorism planned by the ring and has only one day to prevent the Nazis from sinking a new ship at its commissioning in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

In one of Hitchcock's perverse twists, the Nazis succeed in this act of sabotage. One of the Nazis looks out of a car window while escaping and sees the ship on its side. No action movie made today would have the hero struggle to prevent a terrorist attack and even partially fail. Kane stops the saboteurs from blowing up the Hoover Dam, killing thousands and devastating the Western economy, so he succeeds where it counts, but he isn't enough of a hero for a summer blockbuster today.

Tobin, the wealthy Nazi spymaster, looks equally elegant in a swimsuit and robe at his own ranch-style mansion in the Southwest, or in a tuxedo at a party in a New York brownstone where the guests are either admirals and generals paying respects to a rich society matron or Nazi spies working with the elegant grande dame to defeat America.

In this film, the rich are the natural allies of fascism, and Hitchcock doesn't think much of the intellectual capacity of America's military leaders if they can be fooled by the Nazis all around them in a twentieth-century Masque of the Red Death.

But not everyone is so blind. For instance, the blind composer who recognizes Kane's innocence and who helps him avoid the police, and who convinces his niece Pat to help him. Pat discovers Kane is wearing handcuffs, but her uncle heard the sound as soon as Kane walked into his cabin, which despite its remoteness is tastefully decorated and has a piano.

Pat tells her uncle that the police say Kane is a dangerous fugitive. He tells her the police couldn't be heroes if they didn't make Kane out to be dangerous. He asks Pat, "Are you frightened? Is that why you're so cruel?" Finally he tells his niece that sometimes one's duty as a citizen is to disobey the law.

For Hitchcock, a new American but someone who definitely chose the United States over other places he could have lived and worked, fear didn't justify cruelty. And cruelty wasn't American.

The least cruel people in Saboteur are the circus troupe that Kane and Pat ask for help. (They resemble some of the characters in the movie Hitchcock made a couple of years later, Lifeboat, in that they represent social types. It's almost a Marxist approach to storytelling, but Hitchcock was no Marxist. He was too much of a pessimist to believe in revolution. For him it was just movie-making shorthand.)

The Human Skeleton, tall and thin, looking like he could be starving, trusts Kane, and wants to hide him and Pat from the police who are searching the circus's vehicles. The Fat Lady, certainly not starving, isn't really afraid of Kane, but she is afraid of the authorities. The Siamese Twins are divided (another of Hitchcock's jokes). The only one with a title or rank is the Major, a little person who wants to appear grander than he is. The Major wants to give Kane to the police.

The Human Skeleton wants to decide "democratically" and it's up to Esmerelda, the Bearded Lady, to cast the deciding vote. Esmerelda sees that Pat trusts and loves Kane (it doesn't take long in the movies) and, like Pat's uncle, the blind composer, she protects them from the police.

Even though most of the Nazis are captured or killed, it seems the masterspy Tobin escapes to Latin America to sit out the war. ("Havana will be lovely.") And I wonder whether Tobin's fellow conspirator, the dowager, with all her money and friends in the War Department, won't be able to talk her way out of the accusations against her. If she's guilty of treason, all her important friends are guilty of stupidity.

That's why I prefer Hitchcock's style to contemporary action flicks. Hero fights spy; hero tries to save spy dangling from national monument; spy gets killed; hero and girl kiss; THE END.

Hitchcock doesn't show how perfect everything will be now, because as much of a fantasist as he is, he knows we won't buy that.



4/5 Decent way to spend 2 hours
  by nnicko
Just a quick comment. Why in heck would Cane grab onto Frye's sleeve when he could have grabbed his arm??????

5/5 It takes gut to do war propaganda
  by Jacques COULARDEAU (OLLIERGUES France)
The subject is banal, even in 1942. It is war propaganda. The fascists are among us and they are doing all they can to sabotage the war effort and to prepare their victory and their seizure of power then and their establishing an effective totalitarian state. But Hitchcock has to make it a real thriller. So he invents a first sabotage that succeeds but one of the victims, the friend of the one who dies in it, becomes the prime suspect and run-away for the sabotage. That enables him to so-to-say visit the country and discover the tricky organization of the local Nazis who have acquaintances and support in the top benevolent society and use the small little dissatisfied whites to do the dirty work. The chase after the real saboteur takes our young false suspect from Los Angeles to New York and to the top of the organization. He meets a blind pianist who believes his senses to know the chap is not guilty, his niece who is a star of the advertising billboard but also a frenetic and fanatic patriot who only thinks of going to the police. Then the rich rancher and his nest of plotters. Then, on the road some sympathetic and friendly truck driver, and the long caravan of a circus going around and their dwarf, bearded woman, Siamese sisters, and a few other grotesques of that type. And he discovers the target in a Soda City, an electric dam that provides Los Angeles and its war industry with the energy they need. He takes part as a gravel in the organization in the sabotage of a USS Alaska military ship when it is launched. And finally with some inventiveness, creativity and elbow grease he and the pianist's niece manage to get the whole lot cleaned up, most of them arrested and the first saboteur, a certain Fry, falls down from the torch of the Statue of Liberty. That one won't fry on the old electric sparking chair. But Hitchcock is not yet in his habit of having a personal cameo appearance in his own films, so don't look for him. It's well built and well performed, but it is only a propaganda film with an extra style.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines


4/5 Great B Hitychcock
  by George Bohrer (Erving MA)
Alfred Hitchcock rarely worked with B actors and production teams. In Saboteur he did, and produced a charming film that reflected his ongoing concerns of trust and guilt/innocence. The Statue of Liberty sequence is worth the price by itself.

This film is a great companion piece to The 39 Steps and North By Northwest.