Saboteur

“All these people. Isn’t there anyone we can trust?” The alienation reflected in lines like this one, along with the frequent dives into brilliant B&W expressionism, nudge Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur from a typical war film or spy thriller into film noir territory. An American variation on the theme Hitchcock so deftly exploited in his Sabotage (1936) six years earlier, Saboteur tells the story of an ordinary citizen (movie theater manager in the earlier film, factory worker in this one) whose life is endangered by their proximity to an act of violent, treasonous terrorism. Based on a script co-written by Dorothy Parker, Peter Viertel, and producer Joan Harrison, the film stars Robert Cummings as Barry Kane, whose best friend is burnt to a crisp in an aircraft factory fire caused by a sociopathic traitor named Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd, who died in 2021 at the age of 106) but for which Kane quickly becomes the primary suspect. Forced to go on the run and hell bent on tracking down Fry, Kane hides in the woods, a mountain cabin, a circus caravan, a desert ghost town, a spy ring, an opulent Manhattan apartment, a battleship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and up and down the exterior of the Statue of Liberty; indeed, the degree of adventure and conflict — and the number of set pieces — is near the top of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. Priscilla Lane plays Pat Martin, the love interest Kane meets on his journey who, prepared to rat him out at first, emerges as his partner in flight. The film is a cinematic marvel, a smorgasbord of Hitchcock’s greatest artistic and technical gifts on display from the earliest sequence when the hangar opens like heaven’s gates and the clouds of smoke drift slowly onto the screen. Saboteur deserves far more admiration than its current status as a lesser-known Hitchcock film would suggest.